Sorry for being a tad green. Andre Schmidt has made some SVG GUI examples http://osku.de/svg/gui-examples/. Say one would like to use such GUI's to - via OSC - control things in a Pd patch running on, say, localhost. What is the obvius next step?
My intuition doesn't ask for a Firefox extension, but rather some Java Script that can send the OSC messages to Pd. Any pointers would be nice.
Well, that's just the problem. There is no way to send UDP messages from JavaScript just like that. (As far as I know..)
So I wrote an XPCOM component which JavaScript can talk to as per my example. The XPCOM component is written in C++ and uses LibLo to send and receive OSC.
So say you wanted to get these SVG examples working with OSC. (Thanks for the link by the way!!)
The way my example works is that it is a XULrunner app (basically the firefox back-end), and it has a file called "oscapp.xul". This file tells it what the interface should look like. i.e., open a window and put a browser in it. In the <browser> tag there is an attribute which tells it to load the file "test.xhtml" into the browser. You could, for example, change this to point to your SVG files. Alternatively, have test.xhtml include your SVG files and arrange them on the page.
Then do the same thing I did in test.xhtml -- link to a JavaScript file, test.js, and create a function which instantiates the XPCOM component, called OpenSoundControl, and use it to send a message.
Take a look at "test.js" for an example of how to do it. I make no claims that my object has the best possible API, but it works.
The advantage of doing it this way over using a PHP or Python back-end is that it doesn't require running apache or communicating with it using HTTP, which probably introduces unwanted latency. The application just sends and receives OSC directly. (However, if you find writing a server back-end easier and more familiar, I say go for it!)
Cheers, Steve