Team handball is in? Baseball is out? Trampoline an Olympic sport? What has this world come to?.

The video controller you mentioned at www.nbcolympics.com was pretty cool. During broadcasts you could view and manage multiple live videos with vivid clarity. Video on the web has come a long way in a short time. You can now view videos online that may be better quality than what you are seeing on your TV.

NBC was using a new technology from Microsoft called Silverlight. Bill says Silverlight will “light up the web”. Take a few minutes at www.silverlight.net to see what else the boys from Redmond say about this.

Most people would describe Silverlight as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash. Flash is the popular application most web sites use to stream video into web pages. If you’ve been to youtube.com, you’ve used Flash. If you haven’t, go there are search for “the best commercial ever english”. It’s pretty funny.

Microsoft says Silverlight is revolutionary. This propeller head thinks it’s evolutionary. To some extent it does leapfrog Flash, but it’s not Web 3.0.

Flash and Silverlight are both web plug-ins. These are accessories to your web browser that install themselves on demand. Once installed, the plug-in sits quietly until you visit a site that requires its capabilities. Plug-in’s can cause problems if from malicious sources and are sometimes not permitted in corporate Internet systems.

Why use a plug-in? Well, the capabilities built-into browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera have some limitations that affect how well they can handle things like streaming video and audio. Plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight can overcome these limitations. In addition to streaming media, plug-ins allow web developers to build really cool, user friendly, interactive sites that perform like desktop applications. Pardon my drool.

That’s really what makes Silverlight special. It has features that let web developer’s build web sites that provide a whole new level of dynamic interactive capabilities to the web. A nice site that shows off some of what I am talking about is at sirius2.intersoftpt.com.

Silverlight applications are delivered to your browser in a language called XAML (pronounced zamel ). This is a tagged-based language like HTML. Because of this, Silverlight is searchable by google and other search sites. This provides another advantage for Silverlight applications over Flash.

Another cool Silverlight feature is called Deep Zoom. This provides a high performance zoom capability that you will find sweet. Zoom in on the cats at robburke.net/images/deeplol.html to see what I mean.

Looking for some fun? Play Line Rider at www.linerider.com. Or check out www.mashooo.com for a showcase of Silverlight’s entertainment capabilities. Fair warning: theses cute game can be addictive, although some are a little rough as the web developers are still getting used to the new technology.

While Silverlight will perform well on most browsers, it is built for Windows and .Net. For Linux users, the Moonlight project (www.mono-project.com/Moonlight) ensures that the Silverlight powered sites will perform as expected for the Penguin lovers out there.

I have decided to take some time off from my rhythmic dance practice to experiment with Silverlight. I need to have a plan B just in case rhythmic dancing is booted from the Olympics too!