NMC Campus Observer

HTML On a Prim? Web in a Profile

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Sep 19, 2007 04:36pm

There’s been quite an active back and forth this week on the Second Life Educators (SLED) listserv as people advocate for and against the desire to be able to render a full functioning web content on an object in Second Life.

I too have wishes for more connectivity between the virtual world and the web world, especially to be able to dynamically texture a prim with an image via a URL. Oh give me an easy flickr on a prim, and I might be happy. Others are wishing for more or less the operations of a real web page in SL, for connecting to resources, for collaborating (”in world wikis”) while others point put the technical complications, or suggest it detracts from the experience. A big step to me, would be to make the reading from and writing to the web from scripts easier than what it takes to use the HTTPRequest coding (and the programmers are tsk-tsking and say, just learn it).

But you know there is a rendering of the web inside your client. There’s been for more than a year that capability in the help pages- when you open the window for help in second life, it is actually reading the info from a web site, and providing links to elsewhere. One hack a while ago was editing a client preferences file outside of SL that could toss another URL in place of the Second Life help pages. It works… but that’s in the moderate to severe hack territory for most ordinary users.

Yet, there is another place in the SL client to see web content.. in your profile. There is a place, the second tab, to insert a URL that is associated with your profile- could be your home page, your flickr photos, your cat’s blog. The last time I looked at this feature, it required your web page to use special CSS formatting so it could render in a reduced manner (its a small window)… but I noticed today, that it pretty much renders the regular web page as it normally looks in a browser. And all the links work.

My SL profile links (of course) here to http://sl.nmc.org:

so that anyone who might look at my profile (all 2.5 of you) would see a live copy of that URL. And browse from there.

It’s not anywhere near the functionality of “HTML on a Prim” (I keep hearing “shrimp on the barbie” for some reason when I hear that), but if you think about it, you could use it to render current information about yourself (e.g. using a blog), or perhaps a list of upcoming events you are involved with, or photos of your latest SL adventures, your twitter output, or… well, maybe you have a better idea what this simple web view could do. It could be a simple launch pad…

I have little doubt we will see a bit more of web / SL convergence, but I am thinking hard whether I want to see Sl landscapes littered with MySpace pages and such.

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