Tim,
In 2009 I was ready to write off SVG as a standard that failed. Today, the only reason that SVG isn't more widely used at the web application layer is legacy browsers, and over time I think that problem will go away. What changed? Canvas was backed by the WHATWG group as the uber solution for graphics on the browser, yet developers kept coming back and saying "That's nice, but I really kind of need SVG."
Yesterday I had lunch with a couple of engineers from Boeing. They were well on their way to having sophisticated circuit diagram applications rendered in SVG being done - technically it was a fairly easy problem to solve, given the scale. However, they were fighting DoD requirements that mandated supporting a ten year old browser specification with no plugins. This is a time frame problem, and one that ultimately I think they'll be able to work around, especially as they are able to offer the advanced technology to other customers.
XForms has been a thorn in the side of the WHATWG for a long time, primarily because it ran very much counter to the prevailing mantra of "JavaScript uber alles". Except for a few key partisans, it is virtually forgotten. Instead jQuery solutions have achieved near uniform dominance, in part because it fit most closely into the dot-notation paradigm that so many web developers have been convinced is the way to write such applications. I'm less optimistic about its future, even though XForms 2 is moving towards working with JSON as well as XML, but I still feel that it nicely solves a whole class of problems that the endless proliferation of other frameworks don't.
Kurt
