Revolution Media Presentation Viewable on Web?

Bill Marriott wjm at wjm.org
Tue Jun 27 17:52:38 EDT 2006


"Richard Gaskin" <ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote 
in message news:44A1A091.6030701 at fourthworld.com...
> If you can get backing for the development of such a plugin I'm fairly 
> confident RunRev would happily receive the money.

It's always been my plan to win the lottery and give it all to RunRev :)

> A plugin doesn't address that either, since it would still need to be 
> downloaded and installed just like any app, so I'm not certain that's 
> really the best option (try having that conversation with university or 
> hospital IT staff and the knowledgeable ones will raise as many questions 
> about a new plugin as they would about a new app).

Well, they might... but hopefully you'd be able to demonstrate that the 
plugin was much safer than an app. An EXE can do just about anything it 
wants with your system. There's plenty of plugins out there besides Flash, 
anyway. Anytime I go to an online-chat support there's a plugin for the 
chat. Or "smart updaters" for driver software. Or various download managers. 
Or to view a nifty "360 view" of a digital camera.

> Well, why not use the world's most popular presentation layer on the web?
>
> When we consider that the browser experience really deals with only a 
> subset of what Rev can deliver, maybe there's a whole different way to 
> approach this: JavaScript/DHTML (what newcomers to web development are now 
> calling "AJAX").

Ow. My head is starting to hurt! I won't learn JavaScript! You can't make 
me! LOL

> JS provides interactivity in a scripting engine everyone already has 
> installed, and can handle a reasonable subset of the sorts of Rev things 
> that would make sense within a browser window.
>
> One could even take this idea further by incorporating SVG so you can have 
> vectors as well (I have a prototype SVG exporter for Rev in RevNet, and 
> there are more complete implementations around).  And since SVG now 
> incorporates SMIL as a subset, you have support for synchronized 
> time-based media too.

Hey doesn't SVG require a plugin? ;)

Actually, an SVG export/authoring tool would be pretty feasible and 
downright beautiful.

> The full range of things Rev can do would be close to impossible to make a 
> Transcript-to-JavaScript translator for, but again if you need a browser 
> presentation you're probably only needing a fairly narrow subset anyway.
>
> ToolBook provided some handy support for this sort of deployment, 
> providing native libraries with correlating JavaScript libraries for the 
> subset of things that make the most sense in a browser.
>
> There's no reason this couldn't be done in Rev, using a set of templates 
> and wizards on the Rev side and generating corresponding JavaScript/DHTML 
> for web output, just like ToolBook did.
>
> Like Google Maps and Google Earth, there are cool things you can do in a 
> browser and even cooler things you can do in a dedicated app.  If Google 
> Maps represents "Web 2.0", the dedicated Google Earth app represents "Web 
> 3.0". :)  But for those who want ubiquity it's hard to beat a good browser 
> implementation, and with JavaScript/DHTML being just text it's not all 
> that hard to generate when you have an engine that works so gracefully 
> with chunk expressions.
>
> With all the talk of open source support in this community, such an effort 
> based around these open standards on the presentation side should be 
> relatively easy to have at least a basic library and some tools for this 
> in short order.
>
> This would provide an answer for the subset of people who want this sort 
> of thing, and it wouldn't cost RunRev Ltd. anything to see it happen. The 
> company wouldn't need to be distracted from their core mission in any way, 
> and the community would get one more "yes" answer to a common deployment 
> question.  A win-win for all.
>
> So, who's up for herding cats? :)
>
> I'll bet a reasonable v1.0 that addresses the sort of things the Media 
> templates make could be knocked off in under under two weeks' development 
> time....

Despite my jokes this is a really good idea. But it certainly is much more 
suited for building specific applications (i.e., web-enabled Media 
templates) than for building a general-purpose "Rev to Web" converter. Kind 
of like the Microsoft "HTML PowerToy" -- I don't think it would be possible 
to make a converter that would work on every stack.







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