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Figure 2.17:
A hypothetical SMIL page.
Similarly, imagine a SMIL page from an entertainment perspective. Imagine watching a
football game and being able to get statistics of a player by clicking on that player with a
picture-in-picture type of view. Imagine further that while watching the game, you can
video conference with your friend on the same screen and exchange expert comments
on how the game’s going.
These aren’t bleary-eyed fantasies anymore: They’re real live applications that can be
enabled through a standards-based language, SMIL.
SMIL’s backing has teeth (pun intended). The members of the W3C working group who
worked on the SMIL recommendation include members from RealNetworks (as in
RealPlayer), Apple (as in QuickTime), Netscape, Philips, and other top-of-the-line
multimedia players. The recommendation was passed in June 1998, and since then
several SMIL players have been released, including RealNetwork’s G2 player.
As cool as this technology is, it is slightly ahead of the market. Let’s face it, only a select
few of us have T1 or higher access to the Net (blessed be our universities for they are our
providers of high bandwidth). We think it will go through several revisions before
mainstream users are able to reap benefits from it.
