Guenter Hilmer - Phd Thesis - Glamorgan Dspace - University of ...

2.12 Technology 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.12.4 SMIL
The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is another standard
suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium [164]. It focuses on the simple
authoring of multimedia presentations, comparable for example with television.
It is also a markup language designed to deliver multimedia over the WWW. It
is not supported by the standard browsers yet, but special plug-ins or players can
display it, e.g. Real Player G2. For this project it is possible to use SMIL as one
out of many output formats. It could be supported, but it is not a necessity.
2.12.5 HTML and Dynamic HTML
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and its later extension, the Dynamic
Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML) are both accepted standards for delivering
content via the Internet. The content is marked up with HTML [165] or DHTML
as described by [166] and a WWW browser displays the content to the user on
the client side. There is yet another standard suggested by the World Wide Web
consortium: the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) [167].
However, it was decided that HTML will be used during the project.
2.12.6 Java and Java Script
Java and Java Script are programming and scripting languages especially devel-
oped for the WWW. They are accepted within the WWW development community
and will be used during the development of a prototype for this project. This de-
cision is based on the fact that there is no other programming language for the
WWW that possesses the capabilities of Java. Furthermore, there is good support
by literature for Java [168][169][170] and Java Script [171][172].
Other technologies that should be named in this context are the .net framework
[95] and the AJAX (Asynchronous Java Script and XML) approach, which are
used to create interactive WWW based Internet applications [173].
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