Media Design In-Progress is adding the finishing touches to Interaction 2.1, an upgrade to the company’s five month old server-side XML application (CI No 3,398). Interaction is designed to automate the task of adding threaded discussions and chat rooms to Macintosh-based web servers. Version 2.1 adds authoring support for SMIL, the World Wide Web Consortium’s rather controversial synchronized multimedia integration language. SMIL (pronounced smile) has been criticized for reproducing functionality already available in standards like HTML 4.0, Dynamic HTML, Cascading Style Sheets and the Document Object Model. In particular, Microsoft Corp has pulled out of the working group and says it won’t be supporting SMIL. Still, that shouldn’t worry Media Design In-Progress too much. Remember it’s a Mac house. Other new goodies in Interaction 2.1 include management and runtime support for multiple web sites, plus the ability to run back-end CGI scripts on Interaction’s XML processing capabilities. For more details, visit http://interaction.in- progress.com, but make sure you have ten or fifteen minutes up your sleeve. The day we visited, the site was running slower than an ant in honey.
