The World Wide Web Consortium has released the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) specification as W3C Proposed Recommendation. The W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group has deemed that the spec is now ready to enter the review and voting process to determine whether it will become a full Recommendation. The decision process is likely to take six weeks. SMIL is an XML based language for writing television-like multimedia presentations for the web. It simplifies the process of playing multimedia files simultaneously over a period of time. In addition, it reduces the bandwidth of television-like web content so that low bandwidth media types, like text and images, do not need to be converted into high bandwidth video in order to be played as part of the same sequence. The Working Group includes Digital Equipment Corp, Lucent Bell Labs, Microsoft Corp, Philips NV, RealNetworks and the Productivity Works.
