Specification of order and reliability in SMIL documents

Investigates the concepts of order and reliability in multimedia presentations. This paper starts by briefly presenting REMDOR (REmote Multimedia DOcuments Retrieval), an architecture for multimedia communication based on the concepts of partial order and partial reliability at the transport level. The paper then refers to SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language), a recent W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard for multimedia documents, and looks at how the order and reliability concepts of REMDOR can be expressed within SMIL. More specifically, it shows some differences existing between the SMIL and REMDOR temporal models, and shows the limitations of the current SMIL specification in accomplishing the transport layer concepts mentioned above. Suggested extensions of SMIL to handle these differences and limitations are given.