Information is not static; it has relevance only in a limited context and typi- cally for only a limited duration. Some of that information can be readily expressed as text, yet the irony is that the Web is actually relatively information- poor. We are visual beings, yet most of the information on the Web is still presented to us in the form of text. Using an XSLT transformation, you can gener- ate graphics based upon dynamic information, and you can even show how specific data points change over time, either dynamically (through DOM) or based upon previous history (by setting specific animation points within a SMIL statement). Such animations are easy to do in SVG, but they would be challeng- ing at best within Flash or even a dedicated chart component. Moreover, it is possible to build SVG using external libraries (though cur- rently you need to use a lot of DOM to help the process alongsee Chapter 10, SVG Components), and you can make the mechanisms for describing the links to these resources dynamic. This means you could configure the same core SVG document to display different kinds of output depending upon user preferences, the type of data involved, and the kind of browser being used. Nonproprietary Who owns the Web? This is not an academic question, and SVG was actually a central case around which this question hinged. The W3C, since its inception, has adopted a uniform and open license on all standards it has publishedin essence stating that the W3C acts as the owner of all W3C material licenses and makes them freely available to anyone who wants to use them, with the proviso that no one can consequently license modified versions of these standards. This principle is a variant upon the General Public License (GPL, or CopyLeft, as it is sometimes known) that recognizes that the standards being published are essentially being kept as part of a public trust. An attempt was made to seriously undermine that principle in September 2001, though the issue had surfaced with SVG a few months earlier. In essence, the SVG case involved Adobe making a claim of prior patent on the SVG specifi- cation, saying it could prove it had a patent on key technologies used within SVG and consequently could enforce that patent if need be. The implications of this are not clear, though they probably wouldnt have been good. W3C patents had, up until that point, been strictly royalty-free; that is to say, even if a member company had prior patent claims, they would need either to declare that such patents were royalty-free and not claim royalties for the use of the patent or to withdraw that particular technology from the specifi- cation. During one meeting of the W3C Patent Working Group, a second category of license agreements was created called the Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) license. RAND licenses would give the licensees the opportunity to charge 14 Chapter 1