This is an example of Quicktime's ability to read a text file as a text track.
The movie above is stored as a text file containing the following:

{QTtext}
{font:Geneva}{plain}{size:14}
{textColor: 65535, 65535, 65535}
{backColor: 0, 0, 0}
{justify:center}
{width:160}{height:48}
{language:0}{textEncoding:0}
{timeScale:60}{timeStamps:absolute}
[00:00:00.00]
Get
[00:00:02.00]
Ready
[00:00:04.00]
To
[00:00:06.00]
{HREF:<test2.txt>T<myself>}CLICK!{ENDHREF}
[00:00:08.00]
Too late
[00:00:10.00]
Try again
[00:00:12.00]

As you can see described in the text descriptors, when you click on the link, it loads another text file into 'myself' - Quicktime's way of describing the current immediate container for any Quicktime movie.

Once again, the file that is being loaded is just a text file, and we are making use of Quicktime's ability to convert media to its own legible form at runtime. The other text file is very similar. So I wont include it here. You can download it if you want to.

One thing that's important about the targeting is that the 'T' must be in upper case. I got flummoxed by that at first, but got swiftly put on course by the venerable Eric Carlson of Quicktime Engineering.

IMPORTANT!
If you want this to work, you will need to do something special to the html. The tag embedding the movie above looks like this: 

<EMBED SRC="dummy.mov" QTSRC="test1.txt" WIDTH="160" HEIGHT="64" >

This demands that there is a file in the appropriate place with the name 'dummy.mov'. (Or whatever you have as your SRC= parameter). I just opened Quicktime player, made a new document and saved it. It contains no data, it's just there so that the browser and server don't notice that anything strange is happening. If you don't include such a file file on your server, the whole trick doesn't work.

QTSRC forces Quicktime to import that data stored at the given url. Significantly, this does not have to be a .mov file, but can just as well be any media type that Quicktime can read. In this case, good old fashioned ASCII.





You can download a binhexed stuffit archive containing all the files here.