alt Hacker NewsI 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:
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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.
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.
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.