RealOne version, including support for SMIL 2.0 transitions
These notes are an accompaniment to the lecture given on November 14, 2002.
Go to the W3C site for the latest information on SMIL and the definitive reference on SMIL 1.0 and 2.0 and related W3C work. If you are creating SMIL files, make use of the online validation service.
There was a good question about why SMIL matters. An answer from a SMIL article is "The key to popularizing SMIL is to emphasize its potential to expand the the possibilities of a media-rich Web, rather than its strictly technical superiority." The full article, "A Realist's SMIL Manifesto" by Fabio Arciniegas A., is available in the O'Reilly xml.com Online Resource Center. This article discusses how you fit items like images into display areas via the fit values fill, hidden, meet, and slice. These are discussed well as part of the RealNetworks Production Guide section on Layout and illustrated here with 5 SMIL files rendered with the RealOne Player.
RealOne version, including support for SMIL 2.0 transitions
QuickTime 6 version, with text captions in separate QTText files
HTML+TIME version, i.e., Microsoft solution is via IE 6.0 web browser rather than via Windows Media Player
SMIL 2.0 version as .smi file, i.e., whatever player is set up as the default to play .smi files will open this SMIL file and play it. As of November, 2002, problems with playing it in Quicktime include the images not being fitted to "meet" (instead they're sliced), and the text area is a fixed width not overridden by the SMIL layout, e.g., no matter what only a certain amount of text will display before being wrapped to the next line. Problems with RealOne playing the file include the text having to be encoded strictly so that whitespace and special characters are escaped, e.g., "this test" is represented as "this%20test" with the space represented by %20, "=" would be represented as %3D, etc.
RealSlideshow/RealText SMIL 1.0 file and accompanying description
RealSlideshow/RealText SMIL 1.0 file
More about the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) work with SMIL: background 1999 article on "The Future of SMIL", more recent examples of supporting rich media (including XHTML+SMIL) are in the NCAM example showcase, including the car example (described in the showcase as "A NOVA physics video clip about relativity" and accessible as a car.zip download).
RealOne is a registered trademark of RealNetworks, Inc. QuickTime is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Microsoft Internet Explorer is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.