GRiNS: A GRaphical INterface for Creating and Playing SMIL Documents

W3C has developed a language for Web-Based Multimedia Presentation called SMIL: the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (pronounced 'smile'. SMIL provides a simple generic declarative language for synchronizing multimedia which could lead to a change in the appearance of WWW presentations away from looking like document pages towards the look of television programmes. The Chameleon Esprit project has developed a browser to play documents written in SMIL in order to demonstrate the language and encourage its adoption, and an authoring environment GRiNS, that can be used to create SMIL-compliant documents. The GRiNS authoring environment allows the original media assets to be allocated to screen locations in a view of the document to be presented, and have have their presentations synchronized on a time line view. A third view presents a hierarchy of the node structure of the multimedia document to promote the re-use of its components, while a fourth view presents the hyperlink structure within the document and pointing to the outside web.