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Reply posted by Brandon on Sat 29 Jun 2002 in response to Painting with SVG, a primer

Of course you are right, but...

yes you are right Jake (as usual), that charts are probably the really
practically useful thing for SVG, and that things I've suggested, and things on
SVGspider aren't reallly of any immediate and obvious use, but then do you
remember when Javascript first was introduced? For the longest time it seems
that all people ever did with it were these stupid rollover images, which are
retarded because in the real world a button reacts to being *pressed* not to
having a hand hover over it. But you (and many others) find Javascript useful.


But to discover useful things, sometimes you need to temporarily ignore the
whole question of whether it is useful. In the example of SVGspider (which I
think is very cool, as long as you keep in mind that it's just trying to
demonstrate that you *can* do a whole site in SVG, not that you necessarily
would *want* to) it serves to demonstrate the possibilities. Only once you
have a concept of the possibilities can you find creative uses for them. So a
lot of what comes first is a lot of useless experiments with what the
technology can do.


If you have ever seen the some of the nonsense that Hollywood put out when it
was intoxicated with the new capability of COLOR film, you'll see the
parallels. Of course the experiments shouldn't necessarily be *published* but
they need to be done. Hollywood did a lot of drivel (worse than their current
drivel) which had no value other than the fact that it was in color. SVGspider
has little value other than the fact that it is in color--er, I mean: SVG.



So from a practical point of view I agree with you entirely, but sometimes it
pays to set aside practicality. Charts may be extremely useful, and may turn
out to be the only really useful thing for SVG, but I'm not going to assume
that just yet. It's best not to get tunnel vision. That's all.