AoyW Means 100% SVG? Online, No. Offline, Yes!

Given our release last week of the SVG Terminal, some folks may have taken the impression that we're proposing all-SVG and a host-terminal model for the next-generation web. That's not the case!

Web 2.5 is about applying web look-and-feel to everyday computing, and fully mobilizing your everyday tools by deploying them as web-like services on mobile devices: laptops, Wi-Fi handhelds, and flash drives. These web 2.5 services drive local screens, using presentation standards like SVG and HTML.

I will confess a bias against HTML... tables & divs & gifs just never impressed me as a composition toolkit. I grant you that for accomodating the limitations of diverse display environments, this approach has merit. But to implement serious authoring tools and effective visualizations, web software needs what the PC has had for years, a flexible 2D rendering API. That is the role of SVG.

Because of the close proximity of these mobile-borne services and local screens, it makes sense to pass user input directly to the service. Otherwise you pile a ton of custom javascript code for each app onto the screen system to provide near-real-time interactivity for XML content.

In the web 2.5 model, with PC-quality apps running out of your pocket, an SVG terminal is the most potent and simple mechanism for presentation and interaction.