New and Emerging Web Hypermedia Technologies

Full-day Tutorial

SMIL 2.0 specifies interactive multimedia on the Web and mobile devices. It enjoyed immediate strong industrial support upon its release in 2001 with implementation on such Web browsers as RealNetworks' RealOne and Internet Explorer 6.0. SMIL 2.0 sets the foundation for a broad family of presentation formats, from SMIL for desktop computers and for mobile devices, to SMIL combined with HTML, and combined with graphics for animation in SVG. Lately, there has been much activity in the different formats and application areas of SMIL. There are also recent proposals for extensions to SMIL, and even W3C activity in SMIL formats such as Timed Text and additional media support in SVG.

This tutorial covers the W3C format SMIL 2.0 and the hypermedia aspects of related W3C formats HTML and SVG. It covers each format as a specification, the sub-languages they defines, the available tools for each, and the current use of each as hypermedia on the Web. The primary hypermedia constructs are described in full. All areas of SMIL 2.0 are overviewed. All languages defined with SMIL constructs, including SMIL 2.0 Language (for desktop computers), SMIL 2.0 Basic (for mobile devices), XHTML+SMIL, SVG and Timed Text are discussed. Available tools for playing and editing these languages are presented and demonstrated. Examples of current use of these languages are played and analyzed.

The tutorial also use material from the book on SMIL written by the presenters: SMIL 2.0 — Interactive Multimedia for Web and Mobile Deves. This book will be distributed by Springer-Verlag in April 2004 (see <URL:http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,10735,5-40109-22-21948972-0,00.html>) several months before the tutorial. The book provides the tutorial with a solid set of tables, tips and running examples. The presenter's experience as head of the development of the commercial SMIL editor and player GRiNS and of the open source SMIL player Ambulant will also inform the tutorial of implementation issues, good practice and industry activity.

About the Presenters

Dick Bulterman
is head of the research theme Convergent Media Interfaces at CWI, the Dutch national center for mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam. From 1998-2001, he was managing director and CTO of Oratrix Development, a CWI spin-off company specializing in full-featured SMIL authoring systems and custom SMIL player engines. Dick Bulterman joined the W3C's Structured Multimedia (SYMM) working group in 1996. He was an active member of the SMIL 1.0 and SMIL 2.0 design teams. He is also co-author of the book SMIL 2.0 — Interactive Multimedia for Web and Mobile Devices.
Lynda Hardman
is head of the Multimedia and Human-Computer Interaction theme at CWI and professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven. Her research interests include the automatic generation of user-tailored hypermedia presentations and document models for hypermedia and synchronized multimedia on the Web.
Lloyd Rutledge
is a researcher with the Multimedia and Human-Computer Interaction theme at CWI in the Netherlands. His research area is the semi-automatic generation of multimedia presentations.
All presenters
have been members of the W3C SYMM working group that developed SMIL since it was started in 1996. Dick Bulterman and Lloyd Rutledge are co-authors of the book SMIL 2.0 — Interactive Multimedia for Web and Mobile Devices, published by Springer-Verlag.