By
April 1998, HTML 4.0 had become the formal follow-up of the previous HTML3.2
version. The biggest improvements come through defining new tags and extending
old tags to offer more flexibility when working with forms and tables. Formatting
and handling user interaction with forms has been improved significantly.
This standard also formally accepts the extended JavaScript event model
(as introduced in Netscape Communicator 4.0). XML
XML
stands for Extensible Markup Language, published by the W3-consortium in
February, 1998. XML is presented as "a common syntax for expressing structure
in data." Structured data refers to data that is labelled for its
content, meaning or use. For example, whereas the "<h1>"
tag in HTML specifies text to be presented by a specific font and weight,
an XML tag will explicitly identify the kind of information: By
separating structure and content from presentation, the same XML source
document can be written once, then displayed in a variety of ways: on a
computer monitor, within a cellular-phone display, translated into voice
on a device for the blind, and so forth. XML will have a life outside of
the Internet, serving the publishing industry at large. Still, the platform-independent
XML will have most impact for the WWW-platform on the short term. SMIL
With
SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language), Web site creators will
be able to synchronize multimedia elements (video, sound and static images)
for Web presentation and interaction. Although you can already send moving
and static images and sound to a Web user, each element is separate from
the others and can not be coordinated with other elements without elaborate
programming. SMIL (pronounced "smile") lets site creators send movies, images
and sound separately but coordinate their timing.Each
media object is accessed with its unique Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
which means that a presentation can be made of objects arriving from more
than one place.
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