Tiger's Tales

We know that a built-in web browser is coming to Second Life, first as a window, then as WWW-ona-prim.

But what about a third use?

First, I guess I need to suggest a possible feature of this new incorporated browser. When you click a link, the browser interprets the URL and does what it needs to. If the URL starts with “http://” then it loads the indicated web page. If it starts “ftp://” then it connects to the indicated FTP server and lists the files in the window. There are other types of URLs, and it’s possible for new ones to be added. In fact, Second Life already makes one new URL type available now. URLs starting with “secondlife://” can be used to launch SL (if it’s not already running) and indicate a position to be teleported to.

With an incorporated browser, this sort of thing is even easier to do… AND it can be expanded upon. With all control of URL parsing contained within the SL client, any number of new URL types can be added and reacted to. For example, maybe the URL “slcmd://say/Hello%20World!” would, when you clicked it, make you say “Hello World!” out loud. (The %20 is URL-speak for a space.)

But why stop there? Anything you could tell your client to do, you could potentially tell it to do THROUGH a built in web browser: start animations, trigger gestures, map a location, send a command to an attachment, speak a string…

But there’s more than just those. Anything in the current UI could have its own equivalent URL to trigger it. In fact (and now we start to break some ground) the entire UI could be replicated with a web page. Every command you can give you client, from setting yourself as (Away) to the most esoteric debug command, could be replicated in a web page.

But who would want to? One more jump here… Make a browser window that has a transparent background, no frame, and that fills the whole screen.

Remove Second Life’s current UI. Rebuild it in CSS and DHTML. Release the source to the public so anyone can alter it. Custom, interchangeable user interfaces for all.

It won’t be easy to get it all together, but once done it would be very powerful. Along the same lines, HUDs as we know them can be replaced with smaller versions of this transparent browser window.

HTML on a prim will be nice, yes… But THIS, this is where the potential is.

(But this is off-top-of-head rambles, as I am prone to. The might be flaws in the idea. I’ll think on it more…)