Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

Timing and Synchronization

Accurate and predictable timing and synchronization are critically important to a multimedia integration technology. Any presentation in which the synchronization of a video clip and its accompanying speech or on-screen text were out of synchronization would appear very amateurish at best. In order to succeed in synchronizing different parts of a multimedia presentation, it is necessary to have an accurate timing mechanism so that related parts of a presentation can be timed to start together or at various times to produce a synchronized presentation.

Essentially two (or more) multimedia objects can be played at the same time (in parallel), or they can be played one after the other (in sequence). In SMIL, parallel play ...