The world-wide-web (www) as designed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as designed as a mechanism for hyperlinking text. A long two years later, Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina released a web browser for the www called Mosaic with a key added feature: images. The web has not looked back since.

Subsequent innovations have been under-the-hood of the web browser. Adopting industry-wide techniques and standards, the design of web pages improved, and the use of Javascript has added dynamics once the prevail of desktop applications.

But where is the video? And the moving graphics?

Showing video and moving graphics on screen in a web browser across variable speed connections, to computers of varying abilities is a tougher nut to crack.

In 2007, Microsoft released a plugin for web browsers called Silverlight. Silverlight is a cross-web browser, cross-operating system platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering richer video and graphic media and rich to the Web.

How do you check to see if you already have Silverlight, or need to update to the latest version? Simple: go to the Microsoft Silverlight web site.

By taking your web browser to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight and clicking on the big button "Click to Install"

Internet Explorer is concerned with the security, so it displays this dialog box to ensure you wish to install the Silverlight application. Note that the source is from microsoft.com. Click on the "Run" button

After clicking run, the Install Silverlight dialog box will appear. Click "Install now".

As the Installation Successful window describes, there is no need to restart your whole PC.

Once installed in your PC, it is time to look at the Showcase of web sites that use Silverlight.

The Silverlight show case is here: http://silverlight.net/showcase/

And if you think you are becoming addicted to Silverlight, do not worry; you are not alone: Silverlight Rehab.