[ba-ohs-talk] OHS: Some thoughts
I have seen the light! (I think). (01)
I may be slow to grok things, but a demo of SVG yesterday set me to thinking. (02)
I watched a fellow creating graphics and text with a, get this!, Web
browser! I asked him if what he was creating could be shared client-server
or p2p for collaborative development of the image; his answer: Yes. All you
really need to share is the data for the image, not the whole SVG code. (03)
I visited http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/main.html and clicked on the very
same demo he was running. As long as you have the SVG viewer (free, not
sure about Linux) available at that adobe site, you, too, can play with
it. Try the Chemical Markup demo as well. There, you will see diagrams of
molecules that you can rotate, zoom, and so forth. (04)
This has just got to be a great way to give an OHS the interactive,
user-configurable horsepower it wants. (05)
SVG is just an XML language. It can accept as content such things as
javascript, topic maps, whatever. I think there is great power there. (06)
In an earlier draft of this email, I tried pasting the source code (SVG)
for an image I created online; that crashed Eudora for reasons I still
don't understand, so I'll leave it to those who see merit in this to visit
the adobe site and create their own images and view the source (right mouse
click). (07)
What's truly amazing is that some drawing programs (e.g. Adobe Illustrator)
now export to SVG. This means that you can design an entire Web page in a
drawing program, export to SVG, then just paint the dynamic portions with
SVG code from a database. To jump to a new page, in the same sense that
frames mean you don't repaint the whole page, SVG just repaints the changed
data. (08)
In line with a post I made earlier about using XML and JavaScript for Web
engines, SVG might take that concept to the level necessary for the
evolution of an OHS. (09)
It might be worth using some ohs-talk bandwidth to accumulate a list of all
candidate SVG technologies that could find their way into an OHS design effort. (010)
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XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web.
Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-74960-2. (011)
NexistWiki
http://www.nexist.org/wiki/ (012)