Happy Birthday to SMIL!

The SMIL language just had its 5th birthday!  On June 15, 1998 SMIL 1.0 became a W3C recommendation.  I have fond memories of that, since it was the SMIL tutorial article, Synchronized Multimedia On The Web, that was my first published article.  If you haven't seen the example presentation, What I did Last Summer..., you should take a look some of the neat tricks SMIL (even the old 1.0) makes possible.  But with respect to SMIL's birthday, Philip Hoschka from the W3C pointed out a few notable notes:

• SMIL support in more than 15 "players" http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/#SMIL
• SMIL support in more than 20 authoring tools http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/#SMIL2
• SMIL is used as foundation for animation in SVG
• SMIL is used as media synchronisation and presentation  format for 3GPP MMS ftp://ftp.3gpp.org/specs/latest/Rel-5/26_series/26140-510.zip
• SMIL is part of MPEG-4 (as XMT)

Of these, I think the MPEG4/XMT connection is perhaps the most important for the continued growth and influence of SMIL in the communications industry.

Some cool SMIL 2.0 examples can be found at the French National Research Institute INRIA's site.  INRIA also is the source of the LimSee2 SMIL authoring tool.  I've been meaning to give that a try...