I've just finished reprogramming a lunar calendar that was my first big programming project as an undergraduate back in the 70's. Back then it was FORTRAN on punched cards driving a Calcomp drum plotter. The new version (http://elf.org/moons) is programmed in javascript and produces an SVG graphic by populating an empty document with DOM calls.
It's a demonstration of how much you can get away with inside a browser these days. The whole calendar runs and renders inside Mozilla/Firefox with no plug-ins requred at all. IE needs the Adobe SVG viewer for the time being, but I hear that integrated SVG support is expected around IE7.2. I haven't had a chance to try Safari. But I downloaded Opera and it worked there, no problem at all. This example is a really classical computation and a very simple graphic, but there are lots of possible extensions to this basic framework: you can add interactivity by hanging event handlers on the graphics; you can mutate the graphic through the DOM at any time; you can layer in additional information asynchronously with background XMLHTTPRequest's; you can get a lot of additional graphic effects out of SVG; and so on. I think SVG+javascript is going to be a fairly useful platform for delivering information graphics and client side number crunching on the web. -- rec -- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
