Multimedia presentation components in e-commerce

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is a recommendation developed by the Synchronized Multimedia Working Group in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). SMIL is a simple and standard way to specify a timeline-based synchronized multimedia presentation over the Internet. It is a declarative authoring language based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to define language-specific data types and tags. Since it is based on XML, it can be included in XML-based catalogs and data interchange in order to provide multimedia presentations. Instead of using proprietary multimedia document types, SMIL elements are standard way to include them. We discuss different ways to include multimedia presentations in a Web-based catalog. We also describe a component-based SMIL player written in Java. Different components can be put together to create a multimedia player that can run on the major Web browsers as a Java applet.