RE: SVG - A thought

On the one hand I look forward to the death of the browser, although
that'll never happen. On the other hand, media is more or less at the
mercy of the browser manufacturers and whatever / however they support
media. This is even more prominent a vulnerability given the recent
discussion over Mozilla's moving goalpost act. One solution is that
exhibited by Real in creating what is effectively mostly a full browser
for the media types they promote. Quicktime player reminds me of this.
However, this is another vulnerability - look at what happened with
QuickTime. I used to be 100% preoccupied with creating QTVR panoramic
movies at one stage. Unfortunately now I can't rely on any user having
the capability to play a QVTR .MOV without certain media players
attempting to open it and finding it's not what it assumed it was.
 
Again, and I keep banging on about this, but we're at the mercy of
computer legacy and computer habitual usages, in that we're not greatly
more advanced than we were when the version 4 browsers emerged, by which
time Flash had taken a bit of a hold as the way of universalising media
content without having to tolerate the platform differences. I consider
(and it's back to me dreaming again) that our critical 'killer-app' is
not within the computer realm, for us SVG-ers. Yes, it's perhaps in
wireless devices, but it's also on TV. 
 
For starters, imagine a digital teletext that could be implemented over
ordinary PC-like hardware, but essentially consists of FO, SVG and SMIL.
The state of the art in digital and interactive television is in by no
means a fixed state. What's the procedure, I wonder, in demonstrating to
television people that set top boxes (for example, based on the new VIA
Eden embedded board) can be developed upon easily by people who are
essentially 'only' web developers but experienced by ordinary people on
their ordinary sofas while their ordinary VCRs blink 12:00. This
teletext layer could act as anything from the entire user interface to
the television service, to a web content browser, to a means of
presenting interactive (and non-) television programming. The difference
between what is a television program and what is teletext would blur,
and the document aspect could be more 'magazine-ized' than is presently
allowable. Perhaps. This is a medium crying out for an intelligent
graphic implementation such as SVG.
 
Perhaps the big red herring is the thought process that says we have to
experience our media on the same kind of box that we create it with.
Break this barrier and a new frontier opens. (Yeah, like, as if.)
 
VIA Eden - http://www.via.com.tw/en/Products/eden.jsp 
 
Cheers. Ian Tindale.