Multimedia Extensions and the Internet

Interactive gaming shows how popular enhanced multimedia extensions can be on the Internet.

Imagine sitting in your den, running a flight simulator program on your PC, engaging in a dogfight with someone around the world in front of his PC (see fig. 1.9). You are flying against each other in real time. The sounds are cracking, screeching, and whooshing from your stereo speakers, and the three-dimensional graphics draw you right into the action with a display as vivid and real as in any movie—and more interactive, too. Does that sound far out?

Fig. 1.9  Descent, a popular interactive virtual reality game, might eventually be played over the World Wide Web using SGML markup on Web pages with expanded multimedia extensions.

You can do this today by running game software over Internet Relay Chat (IRC) lines on the Internet. The technology is still rather crude, though. A better bet is to play on local bulletin board systems (BBSes) that have special software. Enthusiasm for easier tools is high.

The multimedia extensions that are so popular from the gaming world can be added to all the types of information currently found on the Internet. Applications available through a multimedia SGML Web browser might include:

•  A talking Gopher client that encourages you to keep looking for what you cannot find

•  An e-mail client that sings “Happy Birthday” to a loved one

•  A movie viewer that plays movie clips from within the Web browser in real time

•  A full-screen game window that plays all current virtual reality games and simulations interactively with opponents from anywhere on the Web

The sky is the limit. If it can be represented digitally, it can be typed, structured, and distributed through SGML over the World Wide Web—perhaps not right away, but eventually. What everyone is waiting for is compression technology that enables extremely large files to be moved at a reasonable speed. There are many technical hurdles to be jumped, but the SGML groundwork is in place.

From Here…

The SGML standard enables you to define a markup scheme to transport documents between processing systems regardless of distance, hardware, and software. Government and civilian use of the standard has proven its value for individual users. HTML on the Internet is one small example of how valuable and important a single SGML implementation can be. The future prospects for SGML are staggering.

For more information, refer to the following:

•  Chapter 2, “SGML View of the World: Structure, Content, and Format,” discusses the structure of documents.

•  Chapter 3, “SGML Terminology,” defines the terms you need to know to use SGML effectively.

•  Part V, “SGML and the World Wide Web,” tells you how to upgrade an HTML Web site to an SGML Web site.

•  Part VII, “SGML Tools and Their Uses,” discusses how to use SGML tools to produce documents and DTDs. Some of these tools are included on the CD-ROM that comes with this book.