HTML in 1.7 Extension Suggestions

Not so much about behavioral suggestions, like "support Flash" or "support <blink> and <marquee>" but about extensions to integrate the browser with the client more tightly. My meager contributions:

1. Javascript extensions
   Rather than extend XHTML in order to add things, would humbly suggest doing it all via Javascript. For example llDialog will make your client speak; it would be nice to have similar capability via the browser window for more complex dialogs. The following code fragment is probably self-explanitory.
   
   CODE

   <script type="text/javascript">
       function doAction(evt)
       {
           SecondLife.say(1234, "Hello, world!");
       }
   </script>
   <a href="target.html" onclick="doAction">Click</a>

   
   
2. Custom protocol(s)
   The ability to load inworld assets would be excellent. Rather than extending the secondlife: protocol type, another type such as slasset: could be used. More self explanatory code.
   
   CODE

   <img src="slasset://89556747-24cb-43ed-920b-47caed15465f"/>
   <a href="slasset://89556747-24cb-43ed-920b-47caed15465f">Click</a>

   
   
3. Header information
   One thing I believe that the EVE Online in-world browser does is add an extra header to requests made on trusted sites. For SL the obvious usage of this would be sending the location info. "Second-Life-Location: Mocha, 180, 90" for example. Then when loading a site like Landmarker it could present location specific data easily.
   

This makes the most sense to me of any suggested 'client-side page to world' interface I've seen, including my own. Extending Javascript in Mozilla is apparently relatively straightforward, and the necessary "speak on channel _" client code has already been done for llDialog.

The need for a communications link between a page loaded on the client and the world should be obvious to everyone: it opens up almost unlimited UI possibilities, everything from games to vendors becomes trivial to implement. More importantly, with the ability to generate HTML from a script, it lets creators build fully interactive pages and applications without needing to ever involve a web server.

As for the loading of SL assets as viewable images in a web page, that adds an extra step, downloading and converting the JPEG2000 image streamed from the Linden servers to a format readable by Mozilla. That said, I think it would be useful with the "serverless website" creators. If it can be done without causing too much undue load, I say go for it.

JPEG2000 would be a nice contribution back to the Open Source Mozilla project. It would benefit SecondLife (pulling textures for multiple servers in JPEG2000 is a more efficient use of bandwidth), and I'm sure the Mozilla team would appreciate it. There seems to be lots of Open Source software being used inside of LL, so giving back would be nice.