THE WORLD WIDE WEB CONSORTIUM (W3C) has acknowledged the joint submission of the new Vector Markup Language (VML) specification from Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and diagramming and technical-drawing software giant Visio Corp. The specification seeks to bring high-quality, editable 2-D vector graphics to the Web.

This is significant because many engineering communities rely on 2-D vectors in the graphical documentation of their technical publications.

The proposed VML standard will enable developers to deliver integrated, scalable graphics with faster download speed, and the ability to interact and scale with other elements on the same Web page. Hyperlinks may be added to the VML elements as well.

VML is a format based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), an emerging flexible and open text-based language that complements HTML.

EE TIMES' Craig Matsumoto interviewed five industry leaders on the so-called "Asian flu." Hear Aart de Geus of Synopsys and Robin Saxby of ARM Holdings in RealAudio.

JUNE15-19: The 35th Design Automation Conference (DAC) is happening next week, and the site has all the particulars: registration, housing, keynotes, vendors and the technical program. EE Times Online has already started a related news site.

INTEL has upgraded its Product Selector, a Web-based product-selection tool that filters through the company's 1,600 products. Engineers can now get dynamically generated product-information pages on site. When designers select the product that meets requirements, they are linked to product-specific information. The tool also now accesses two databases which are updated daily.

PHAR LAP SOFTWARE INC. (Cambridge, Mass.), which provides tools for developing embedded and hard real-time systems, now offers Embedded WebFarm, a collaborative project between the company and its embedded PC hardware partners. The site allows systems engineers to try out Phar Lap's real-time operating system (RTOS), and its Realtime ETS Kernel on different X86 hardware platforms.

"I'M SURE YOU'RE tired of hearing the hype about the Internet, but I think most of the predictions in some ways fall short of what will really happen. The Internet is now fundamental.

"Think of the innovation: the tools, the communications companies coming in to provide bandwidth.

"Whether it's phone companies or cable companies, the hardware companies doing the equipment that will move information at unbelievable speeds, or the software companies building these things-the pace of investment is mind-blowing."

- Bill Gates, Microsoft

EG3.COM'S EE Hunter offers a handy listing of the Web's best EE search sites. Categories include bookstore, components catalog, distributor, overall engine, institution and news.

AS THE BASEBALL SEASON moves into full swing, statistically obsessed engineers now have a Web heaven.

Begun by the company Stathead Consulting, which consists of Keith Woolner, a Stanford University grad in engineering-economic systems; Tom Fontaine, an EE from the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Nate Calvin, an EE from MIT, "The Baseball Engineering Home Page" seeks to bring "high-quality decision engineering and econometric modeling techniques to the field of baseball."

Peruse the Stathead team's latest performance stats in the categories of offense (hitting, stolen bases); pitching; defense and fielding; and the very economics of baseball (salaries, strikes, competitive strategies and legal issues).

"What-if" scenarios abound-there's analysis projecting Ted Williams' career had he not fought in World War II and Korea. The Statheads poke fun at themselves, pointing to amusing articles about those with numbers-obsession disorder.