That's definitely technically impressive. The thing is, though, I will never understand why people show this kind of thing off. Nobody is going to make a video like this in SVG except when they're showing off the capability of the browser - it's simply not worth the money or the time.
I mean, sure, it's a tech demo, and a damn impressive one at that. But what's it showing off? Those of us who know why it's technically impressive know that it's never going to be worth it to do anything of this scale. Those of us who don't don't see any difference between this and, say, a flash video.
Regardless of whatever it is that I'm missing, this is fantastic. I can't even imagine just how difficult this would have been to make.
It's not like there have been thousands of Flash movies and games made this way. No no no.
It's showing off that SVG movie playback is there, and that we killed the chicken and egg problem of another area of Flash: now we only need authoring tools whereas before who would build SVG authoring tools when there was no player?
Which brings us to how difficult it could have been to be made, as it really comes down to what authoring tools they did use. Interestingly enough, after the animation they offer a "simple mode" to trivially alter colors of the animation.
I see it as a strong signal of:
- cross-browser compatibility went a step further.
- one more thing we don't need a proprietary crashing blob anymore as there is an open alternative. I was also pleasantly surprised at how well it played on my Mac and Chrome. It was a bit slow at start on Firefox 4, and was (surprisingly to me) even faster than Chrome on Safari.
I'd disagree that it's never going to be worth doing something of that scale. Protovis/D3/Raphael visualizations could easily get to that level of complexity. I've already used Protovis to display 2mb geojson files, so I think people will use all the SVG performance they can get.
I disagree. I view this sort of exercise the same way I view concept cars. These sort of "what if" exercises serve to push the boundaries and show what we can accomplish with this technology. It might also serve to spark an idea in someone who was previously unaware they could do something like that.
I mean, sure, it's a tech demo, and a damn impressive one at that. But what's it showing off? Those of us who know why it's technically impressive know that it's never going to be worth it to do anything of this scale. Those of us who don't don't see any difference between this and, say, a flash video.
Regardless of whatever it is that I'm missing, this is fantastic. I can't even imagine just how difficult this would have been to make.