XML Unleashed

SMIL Basics

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) allows Web developers to pull together and synchronize various types of media. Before SMIL, the Web already had a fair amount of support for multimedia objects such as images, sounds, and video. However, there was no elegant way to integrate these elements to create a rich multimedia experience. You could always use a video-editing tool to place text and static images within a video clip, but that requires a lot of storage, which means huge bandwidth problems on the Web. A more elegant solution would synchronize media with a minimal impact on bandwidth.

To get a better idea of the significance of synchronized media, consider a basketball game on television. The game itself takes ...