By Ian Hollidae, 2025/04/04

A couple of days ago, I ran across an unexpected article in my newsreader. The post was about SMIL and the authors surprise that it was still around. To be honest, I was surprised it may still be around.

For those who don't know, SMIL stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. It was/is a way to create interactive presentations for the web (or whoever implemented the spec). One of the design purposes stated is:

Define an XML-based language that allows authors to write interactive multimedia presentations. Using SMIL 3.0, an author may describe the temporal behavior of a multimedia presentation, associate hyperlinks with media objects and describe the layout of the presentation on a screen.

For a myriad of reasons, SMIL never caught on. It's too bad because I thought it should have been a lot bigger. Bigger than Flash. Bigger than Silverlight. Maybe as big as SVG webwise (SMIL powers SVG animation). Like a lot of others, I thought SMIL had faded away living on only in spirit. I guess the question now is how alive is it?