Microsoft Corp has withdrawn its support for the World Wide Web Consortium’s Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced smile). The Redmond software company was an early member of the group that developed the specification, which uses plain text tags to control different kinds of media – text, images, video – and synchronize them over time (CI No 3,432). Web authors could have a block of text appear, fade and be replaced by video, and fade the video into a graphic image. However in spite of its own early involvement with the spec, Microsoft now says SMIL overlaps and possibly even conflicts with other standards, including HTML 4.0, Dynamic HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and in particular the Document Object Model (DOM). DOM is currently a working draft before the W3C. There is no hint as to how to integrate SMIL with DOM, says Joe Herman, product manager platform marketing with Microsoft. Microsoft joins Macromedia Corp in deciding not to develop to the SMIL specification. This is one of the most contentious specifications the W3C has ever considered, says Herman, there are many many people on both sides of the fence. It’s not as it Microsoft was the only vendor that had issues with SMIL. The W3C says it is saddened by the defections but sees a real need for SMIL. Obviously we’d love to have support from all members, Ian Jacobs, W3C spokesman, but there is support from a large number of companies working with multimedia. Jacobs agrees that SMIL reproduces capabilities in other standards, but he says that’s beside the point. Sure, you can do what SMIL does with video. You can do everything another way. The problems with that are, one, bandwidth, two, accessibility to disabled people and three, ease of use. He points out that SMIL improves searchability, for example, by sending text as text. There are lots of advantages in representing types of content in the way they are most naturally represented, he concludes. Microsoft, however, remains unconvinced.
