SVG and SMIL Become Recommended by W3C

c|net reports that SVG and SMIL, XML-based standards for vector graphics and multimedia synchronization, have become recommended standards. Vector graphics and SMIL’s multimedia features will probably do some good things, but since they are XML based they are likely to be quite a bit more verbose than Flash files.

On the plus side, they may integrate better with many other technologies that are in use on the web (search engines, etc.). The sad thing about all of this, is that it does appear to be yet another API that is building. So, we have the Windows API, HTML+Javascript+SVG+SMIL, and Java as major APIs for people to develop for.