Making SMIL Available in Dreamweaver

Before you can truly code SMIL files in Dreamweaver, you have to do a little prep work. It's true that you can basically use Dreamweaver as a text editor to code in SMIL with any preamble, but you would be wasting Dreamweaver's potential ”and you might as well use a text editor at that point.

Some of the techniques necessary for setting up for a new technology were covered in Chapter 1, "Incorporating Content Management Systems," but there are enough differences to warrant a step-by-step procedural. The core remains the same, though; you still need to do the following:

• Establish a new document type.

• Set Dreamweaver as the editor for SMIL documents.

• Build the SMIL tag library.

Following through on these three steps will turn Dreamweaver into a decent SMIL hand-coding tool.