The World Wide Web Consortium's Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) format for encoding multimedia presentations for delivery over the Web is a little-known but widely used standard. As such, the facilities available in SMIL provide authors with a new toolbox of presentation control primitives. Based on a two-part report on SMIL 2.0, the basics of SMIL 2.0 are discussed and compared its features with other formats. This paper focuses on SMIL's basic concepts and structure.