W3C outlines latest Net standard

Rather than flocking to Online Information '98 - which opened yesterday in London - Europe's top data managers heard about the latest Internet standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) seminar at the Royal Society of the Arts.

The W3C hosted a day of lectures on old favourites such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), and then devoted the afternoon to the new entry - SMIL (Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language).
SMIL - an offshoot of XML - promises to bring time synchronisation to Web broadcasts. Tags in SMIL will enable broadcasters to link graphics and secondary footage to their main anchor pieces, so that they appear and disappear on the Web site at the right time.

Michael Wilson, who helped develop the specification at the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CLRC), said a SMIL standard was proposed by the W3C in June 1998 and that the technology has already been adopted by CNN.

Meanwhile, the seminar proved that XML is winning widespread industry approval. Technical experts specialising in transport, health, music and science were busy networking to see whether anyone had started writing XML tags for their industry.

Sun's Jon Bosak, who chairs the XML working group at the W3C, said the next step is to develop hot links in XML that are independent of the documents they link together. He will publish full details of the future of XML in late January.

Further details are available from www.w3.org.