This is a colorful and attractive book that tells you everything you may ever need to know about creating multimedia presentations using SMIL 2.0, the second release of the World-Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language Recommendation. SMIL is an XML language for creating multimedia presentations, integrating media, temporal control and interactivity. A SMIL presentation can contain a combination of any types of media. SMIL itself is media "agnostic", and includes most media types by referencing their URL's rather than embedding them in the SMIL file itself.
The authors, Bulterman and Rutlege, are respected multimedia researchers and were key contributors to both the SMIL 1.0 and SMIL 2.0 Recommendations. They were personally involved in drafting and testing a significant portion of the standard, and the company that Bulterman used to lead, Oratrix, developed one of the first full implementations of the SMIL 2.0 language, Grins. So these guys know what they are talking about.
While the W3C SMIL 2.0 Recommendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-SMIL2-20050107/) is primarily written for SMIL implementors and XML language designers incorporating SMIL features into their XML-based language, the book is written for multimedia content authors. The book begins with an overview of SMIL 2.0, with six example presentations that show how SMIL can be used, some history, and a guide to the organization of the SMIL 2.0 standard. The next chapter gives a brief but useful introduction to SMIL 2.0 code including the major components of the language: structure, media, layout, timing, linking, and control.
Further chapters go into each of these areas in much greater depth, explaining all of the options and features in each component (terms module in SMIL 2.0) of the language. And there are many! To support fully featured, interactive, and attractive multimedia features that allow infinite flexibility in the look and feel of a multimedia presentation, SMIL 2.0 has a ton of features and options. In addition to the components already listed, there is animation (my favorite), transition effects, media clipping, advanced layout, extended control, and metadata. Bulterman and Rutlege do a good job of presenting a lot of material in an organized and attractive manner, with lots of examples.
By and large, the features in SMIL 2.0 are straightforward and intuitive to use, However, as is true in any standard developed to meet the needs of many separate groups (SMIL 2.0, for example), SMIL 2.0 is a large language with some potential pitfalls, and there are some also "doozers" and "gotchas". By necessity, the SMIL timing model is complex. While usually intuitive, in some particular cases the timing elements and attributes can interact in initially surprising ways. For another example, there are two kinds of SMIL XML for representing transitions, and all transitions may not be available in all platforms. The authors calmly guide the reader through all this. Backward compatability between versions of SMIL, including the oddly named 'skip-content' attribute is another complex subject clearly presented.
This book is both more comprehensive and much more attractively presented than any other book on SMIL that I have seen. The "insiders" view of SMIL that authors have is used to round out the explanations and rationale for things to good effect. Overall this is a great book for any multimedia content developer who is using or considering using SMIL 2.0. It will also be useful to SMIL implementation developers as another source of information when reading and implementing the recommendation documents. Lastly it should be of interest to students studying multimedia as an in-depth guide to a specific comprehensive multimedia presentation architecture.
Aaron M. Cohen
Chairman of the W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group (produced the SMIL 2.0 Recommendation)
