Introduction to HTML+TIME

One of the major thrusts of Internet Explorer 5.5 is HTML+TIME. HTML+TIME (Timed Interactive Multimedia Extension), first released in Internet Explorer 5, adds timing and synchronization between HTML elements. HTML+TIME technology allows you to add images, video, and sounds to an HTML page, and synchronize them with HTML text elements along a specified timeline. It allows you to specify beginning and duration times, sequencing and parallelism of element display, and repetition of sequences.

In order to understand the many new features of HTML+TIME in Internet Explorer 5.5, you need to understand the basics of HTML+TIME technology. In this column we'll introduce you to this capability and we'll show you how to use it. Our main focus in this column is to present the main concepts and the basic attributes that you can immediately use in your Web pages. We'll show you how to specify the beginning and end of an element display, how to group HTML elements and apply HTML+TIME attributes to the whole group, how to sequence a group, how to play its members in parallel, and how to repeat the group sequence. We'll also show you how to make the space abandoned by disappearing elements available to be reclaimed by the browser. In this column, we'll cover mostly HTML commands. We'll go into scripting technology of HTML+TIME in advanced HTML+TIME columns.

In this column you will learn: