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Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

Sep 16, 2005

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Introducing SMIL

SMIL is all about creating multimedia presentations in XML. Here's what the W3C says about it on its SMIL page, http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo:

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced "smile") enables simple authoring of interactive audiovisual presentations. SMIL is typically used for "rich media"/multimedia presentations which integrate streaming audio and video with images, text or any other media type. SMIL is an easy-to-learn HTML-like language, and many SMIL presentations are written using a simple text-editor.

You can find the W3C recommendation for SMIL 1.0 at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil and the W3C recommendation for SMIL 2.0 at http://www.w3.org/TR/smil20.

You'll create a SMIL document to see how it works. For this example, you'll create a document, ch13_18.smil, that can be opened in RealPlayer (now called RealOne; available from http://www.real.com for free). In this example, you will display "SMIL" letter by letter—S, then SM, then SMI, and then SMIL, as the user watches.

SMIL is an HTML-like language, and you start by creating a layout in the <head> element of the document. This layout will create two regions, slide and caption; the slide region will display the letters in SMIL, and the caption region will display text:

<smil>
    <head>
        <layout>

               <root-layout width="400" height="250" background-color="white"/>

               <region id="slide" title="slide" left="0" top="0"

                   width="400" height="200"/>

               <region id="caption" title="caption" left="0" top="201"

                   width="400" height="50"/>

           </layout>
    </head>
        .
        .
        .

You use the <par> element to group presentations together, and use the <seq> element to create a multimedia sequence. In this example, you can start by creating a sequence that shows a preliminary image (image0.jpg) that is just a blue background and that you want to display in the slide region:

<smil>
    <head>
        <layout>
            <root-layout width="400" height="250" background-color="white"/>
            <region id="slide" title="slide" left="0" top="0"
                width="400" height="200"/>
            <region id="caption" title="caption" left="0" top="201"
                width="400" height="50"/>
        </layout>
    </head>

    <body>
        <par>

               <seq>

                   <par>

                       <img region="slide" src="image0.jpg"

                           type="image/jpeg" dur="2s"/>

                   </par>

                   .

                   .

                   .

               </seq>

           </par>
    </body>
</smil>

Now you can continue creating the multimedia sequence, displaying additional images and some text as well. The images appear in the region named slide, and the text in region named caption, as shown in Listing 13.18.

Example 13.18. A SMIL Document (`ch13_18.smil`)

<smil>
    <head>
        <layout>
            <root-layout width="400" height="250" background-color="white"/>
            <region id="slide" title="slide" left="0" top="0"
                width="400" height="200"/>
            <region id="caption" title="caption" left="0" top="201"
                width="400" height="50"/>
        </layout>
    </head>

    <body>
        <par>
            <seq>

                   <par>

                       <img region="slide" src="image0.jpg"

                           type="image/jpeg" dur="2s"/>

                   </par>

                   <par>

                       <img region="slide" src="image1.jpg"

                           type="image/jpeg" dur="2s"/>

                       <text region="caption" src="image1.txt"

                           type="text/plain" dur="2s"/>

                   </par>

                   <par>

                       <img region="slide" src="image2.jpg"

                           type="image/jpeg" dur="2s"/>

                       <text region="caption" src="image2.txt"

                           type="text/plain" dur="2s"/>

                   </par>

                   <par>

                       <img region="slide" src="image3.jpg"

                           type="image/jpeg" dur="2s"/>

                       <text region="caption" src="image3.txt"

                           type="text/plain" dur="2s"/>

                   </par>

                   <par>

                       <img region="slide" src="image4.jpg"

                           type="image/jpeg" dur="2s"/>

                       <text region="caption" src="image4.txt"

                           type="text/plain" dur="2s"/>

                   </par>

               </seq>
        </par>
    </body>
</smil>

There are a variety of ways to display ch13_18.smil. For example, you could use RealPlayer/RealOne or you could use the SOJA Player, which you can get at http://www.helio.org/products/smil (SOJA stands for SMIL Output in Java Applets). You can see the SMIL example in RealPlayer/RealOne in Figure 13.18. When you open this document, the letters S, M, I, and L appear one-by-one in the slide region, and the text appears in the caption region.

Figure 13.18 Using SMIL.

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