20 November 2006

html-on-a-prim : not a tech problem?

Maybe the reasons we don't have html-on-a-prim aren't technological. I'm more than a little surprised to find that upload charges were 23% of the total economy drain in October. Even if we could only link to text and textures, it'd leave a huge mark on the linden economy. If they gave us that functionality today, the linden would devalue hard.

There'd be a lot of texture linking bringing calls about bandwidth and image theft, the legal staff and some inworld Lindens would be sobbing, but we've seen that even bad PR brings waves of newcomers. I'm not sure how that'd affect LL's bandwidth bills; newcomers cost, but as builders began using it SL wouldn't be pumping out as many texture files. There'd be a lot less content upload, a blessing for the overwhelmed asset servers. Over time there'd be a growing pile of broken content as webservers go down and files move.

I don't see the same kind of economical damage from having functional html links in a notecard or a new inventory type that would fire up your webbrowser and direct it when clicked from your inventory. It'd be useful as updateable instructions, tutorials with video, as advertisements, as an updatable landmark using slurls, as a link to the latest edition of your favorite inworld newsrags...

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