Introduction to XML

Steve Holzner, another big name in the computing world has written a very informative article that covers many different ways to use XML. This is only one of them:

“XML at Work: Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced “smile”) has been around for quite some time. It’s a W3C standard that you can find more about at http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/#SMIL.
SMIL attempts to fix a problem with modern “multimedia” browsers. Usually, such browsers can handle only one aspect of multimedia at a time—video, audio, or images—and never more than that. SMIL lets you create television-like fast cuts and true multimedia presentations by letting you specify when various multimedia files are played.

The idea is that SMIL lets you specify what multimedia files are played when; SMIL itself does not describe or encapsulate any multimedia itself.

Microsoft, Macromedia, and Compaq have a semicompeting specification, HTML+TIME, which I’ll take a look at next. Microsoft hasn’t implemented much SMIL in Internet Explorer yet because of this reason. You can find a SMIL applet written in Java at http://www.empirenet.com/~joseram, as well as some stunning examples of symphonies coordinated with images. ”

See an example and read the full article at Peachpit.