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Not All SMILsBy Nate Zelnick Industry Standards Still EvolvingThe Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), the latest W3C recommendation, is completely in line with the trend of the consortium for the last few months, in that it builds on the other work of the body in an incremental fashion. In this case it means that SMIL, which is used to create time-based presentations that integrate different media objects into a single document, is based on XML. Scott Clark has already written a ton of excellent articles about SMIL and how to use it, so I’m actually going to depart a little from form here and look at a political argument that has developed around SMIL. Even though SMIL has been in the works for about 10 months and has had participation from a wide swath of interested commercial companies, its passage as a standard was not without some controversy. According to several press reports, Microsoft voted against the specification even though it had participated in its creation. Microsoft will not support version 1.0 of SMIL in its NetShow and MediaPlayer products in Windows. Microsoft’s objections to SMIL, according to Group Product Manager Robert Bennett, is that SMIL’s functionality can be done using other technologies that are already standards—namely Cascading Style Sheets, Dynamic HTML and the Document Object Model’s exposure of page elements as named and scriptable objects. While this argument is largely true, it's not very persuasive. Just because you can do something in one manner, doesn’t always mean it’s the best way for it to be done by everyone in every situation. This is particularly true in the creation of highly functional and widely accessible Internet documents and is, in many ways, exactly why XML is interesting. Let me explain. The W3C model is predicated on the idea that there are clear distinctions between functional sections of a document to make it available in the widest possible way. HTML and XML define a document’s structure, CSS (and, to a lesser extent to support backward compatibility, HTML) defines a document’s presentation. The DOM defines a generic way to manipulate documents via a standard interface. By following this approach, developers can be reasonably assured that their work can be consumed by an arbitrary client with arbitrary capabilities on an arbitrary platform. If, of course, browser makers on all of those various platforms actually implement the standards as they’ve promised. So in some sense, Microsoft is correct in its complaint that much of what SMIL is designed to do can be accomplished using the existing technologies and its complaint is not without some merit. But, the argument falls apart when you look at the reality of what SMIL is and what client software is capable of doing. SMIL’s primary purpose is to define how media objects are displayed over time. While it is certainly possible to script loops that provide triggers for when to display, hide or move objects in a presentation, this gets incredibly complex very quickly when trying to create really interesting multimedia presentations. And that’s before you begin to take into account the frustrating variations in support by even the latest beta version of IE5 and Navigator. [ Click here to move to the next part of the article ]
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