A new markup language that promises to allow for easily crafted, bandwidth-friendly multimedia on the Web has been baptized as an official Internet standard. Yesterday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) declared Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) a Recommendation: the W3C's seal of approval that the specification is final and ready for prime time.

"I am quite happy with the standard, and I hope SMIL is going to be a big success.... We got a big start already with RealNetworks," said Dr. Philipp Hoschka of the W3C and chairman of the SMIL Working Group.

In April, RealNetworks (RNWK) said that its next generation streaming-media platform, RealSystem G2, was designed to support SMIL. Using only simple HTML-style markup tags, SMIL allows Web developers to schedule and choreograph sound, video, text, and other elements on a page. Previously, Web architects looking to create vivid multimedia experiences needed to master complex scripting schemes &£45;- such as JavaScript, Java, or Dynamic HTML &£45;- or development tools.

But SMIL aims to change that. With only a handful of simple instructions and a text editor, designers will be able to layer audio, video, and text on a site or a page by choreographing which media files to "play" when and for how long.

http://www.w3c.org/TR/REC-smil/

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