[Web-SIG] Grail resurrection

[Terry Hancock]

On Tuesday 18 November 2003 10:31 am, A.M. Kuchling wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 09:49:59AM -0600, Terry Hancock wrote:
> > annoying to me because, like Java, it is proprietary.  I really believe
> > that we need an open-source plugin that does what flash does and
> > does it better.  
> 
> What you want is a decent SVG plug-in with JavaScript support and animation
> that actually works.  SVG is a W3C standard, so you don't need to either
> expend effort duplicating Flash's SWF format or invent a new format and
> convince people to use it.

"What flash does" doesn't mean "interpret SWF format".

"What flash does" means "make it easy for web
authors to introduce powerful animated presentation content to
their websites".  Python certainly doesn't have anything to do this,
but I think it might be persuaded to by leveraging existing efforts.

Whether this is accomplished using SVG or a new format entirely
is immaterial as far as I and the web authors (probably) are
concerned. If you think it's good, great.  But bear in mind we need
a *real* *implemented* standard, not something the committee
thought was a good idea at the time, but so far, no one really
cares to actually make work.  SVG is very complicated to implement.
It might be more desireable to define a clear subset of it.

Also, I don't think Javascript + SVG will solve the problem of
interactive input very well -- wouldn't that mostly just solve the
animation part of the problem?  (Admittedly, this may be
all that Flash does, but if we want to offer an alternative to
both Flash and Java, we need this -- and anyway, the
applications I'm interested in need it).

If you want people to *use* the new standard instead of just
smile and nod, it has to actually give them what they want: an
easy authoring environment and output that looks really cool.
Nevermind all that w3c nonsense about "standards-compliance",
"content" versus "presentation", and whether a "text-to-speech
browser for the blind will know what to do with the pages".  You
don't legislate web authors, you woo them.  And the
proprietary world is showing us that it can do this very well.  If
we want the web back, we're going to have to provide
something sexy, not just something sensible.

IMHO, of course.

Now. Having said that, I'm not sure whether SVG + Javascript
can (or can't) do "sexy".  I'm pretty sure it won't do "easy to
author" very well, but I could be wrong about that.  I
personally find Python easier to deal with than Javascript,
but that may be (well -- is) a biased opinion.

It's also not clear to me that "there can be only one!".  I'm
not sure the world can't live with more than one presentation
plugin.  Surely there are enough of us programming in Python,
that the goal of programming in our preferred language
is adequate motivation?

Also, SVG *is still* a new format until people start using it,
which they aren't doing (much), AFAICT.

Cheers, 
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com