An SVG is all you need

I agree with the author when they write:

""" In my idealistic vision of how scientific publishing should work, each paper would be accompanied by a fully interactive environment where the reader could explore the data, rerun the experiments, tweak the parameters, and see how the results changed. """

I do like seeing larger labs/companies releasing research full of SVGs. In recent memory, I quite liked this from NVIDIA:

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/blog/illustrated-evo2/

Without the OP's proposed use of SVG, what format would someone use? PDFs won't handle it well - unless PDF's interactivity capabilities are much better than I think. We never developed a client-side multimedia file format; all we have are text formats like Word and PDF, which embed images decently, and embed multimedia and interactivity (beyond form filling) in awkwardly and in a limited manner.

What's wrong with SVG? Notebooks have their issues but are kinda this conceptually. I guess FLAs and Flash too. But you say we never developed a "client-side multimedia file format". Is that not exactly what html + js are for?

I mean the equivalent of a Word document: a file I can reasonably edit, including editing the multimedia and interactive/dynamic content, save, email, put on a thumb drive or Dropbox, etc.