[some_guy_nobel]

I agree with the author when they write:

""" In my idealistic vision of how scientific publishing should work, each paper would be accompanied by a fully interactive environment where the reader could explore the data, rerun the experiments, tweak the parameters, and see how the results changed. """

I do like seeing larger labs/companies releasing research full of SVGs. In recent memory, I quite liked this from NVIDIA:

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/blog/illustrated-evo2/

[gaha]

This really reminds me of a new paper [1] from my colleagues. All figures in the paper link to a website, where the figures can be reproduced and dynamically changed in the browser from the source data. It's really cool, it is a static website that runs DuckDB, WebR, and ggplot. Here [2] is an example for the first figure.

[1] Paper: https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/fileadmin/w00cfj/dis/papers/clouds...

[2] Figure 1: https://tum-dis.github.io/cloudspecs/?state=N4IgzgjgNgigrgUw...

[_heimdall]

The idea of rerunning experiments only seems feasible when the entire experiment was based on modelling, presumably modelling that can easily/quickly be rerun in a browser environment.

The idea of being able to view and parse the dataset in different ways is interesting though, effectively allowing readers to interpret the experiment's resulting dataset from different angles than the author published.

[mmooss]

Without the OP's proposed use of SVG, what format would someone use? PDFs won't handle it well - unless PDF's interactivity capabilities are much better than I think. We never developed a client-side multimedia file format; all we have are text formats like Word and PDF, which embed images decently, and embed multimedia and interactivity (beyond form filling) in awkwardly and in a limited manner.

[steezeburger]

What's wrong with SVG? Notebooks have their issues but are kinda this conceptually. I guess FLAs and Flash too. But you say we never developed a "client-side multimedia file format". Is that not exactly what html + js are for?

[zipy124]

Even just allowing GIFs or videos to be embedded would be a value add.

[fooker]

Interactive and SVGs don't really mix, although intuitively it would seem that they do. Rendering remotely complex SVGs tale multiple seconds, while any kind of interactivity demands ~30+ frames per seconds.

Without interactivity, postscript is vector graphics too.

[dekhn]

How complex are you talking about? I've done animations with hundreds of elements and it's fine.

[Grimblewald]

I'd be curious to know what classes as complex for you, since ive done some frankly crazy stuff with svg's, which outperformed any raster implementation. Ultimately, poor performance was always my fault, especially initially when i was still treating it with paradigms better suited to the world of raster graphics.