SVG + JS + bits is one possibility, but animation, sound and video support is terribly weak, and it’s not clear that many parts of the SVG standard are ever going to be implemented.

Flash is another, but it’s not really a specified standard and doing a binary format in 2008 is a bit of a strange decision.

There’s MPEG / SMIL, but eh, there are some _real_ patent problems.

Potentially you could try to do something with “Ajax”, but the experience of OpenLaszlo is that it’s a. extremely difficult and b. error-prone. HTML just isn’t designed to do that kind of thing, it’s not a “pixel-perfect” format (and I’m not sure anyone really wants it to be?). It’s also not a standard – the solution would use standard technologies, but would have to exist at a much higher level. HTML is like OpenDocument, Flash/Silverlight is like PDF – very different systems.

It’s very easy to say “there should be a standard” or something, but the free software community just hasn’t done anything in this area. We’re still trying to catch up to simply *play back* existing Flash content.

I would quite happily use something like Silverlight, even if it wasn’t nearly as advanced and didn’t work in IE, if there were decent content tools. The market here is absolutely massive.

It’s hardly wheel re-invention when there is nothing else out there doing that…

The point is that there are no tools for people to develop these things; you have to code them up from scratch/against frameworks in text editors. When you’re doing anything vaguely visual, it’s “tough” to say the least. So, take SVG: how would you animate a character in SVG? What tool would you use to do that, even a simple waving stick figure?

It’s all very well to say that some “heavy lifting” is required: my point is that Microsoft are the ones currently doing it (as free software and in Java, no less). I don’t see anything equivalent even vaguely on the horizon for Ajax or any other system.

For content to be available through standards, as opposed to through a universal blob*, more work might be needed. The Web and the Free software movement were not built without some heavy lifting.

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*Curl and JavaFX being a slight exception.

But anyway, take your point – where are the Ajax content creation tools? As far as I can see, even with the likes of Dijit, people are still having to code up interfaces from scratch, test them in different browsers, work around different bugs.

The closest other free software technology we have is probably XUL. But again, no tools for that either