What's worse, they made a "throbber" effect by string substituting a different color into an SVG, and then reparsing the SVG, for each color it fades through.
That's the kind of coding quality the OLPC project had. That's why it failed, and it probably also factored into why they disabled the view source button.
In modern GTK you also have to string-substitute or otherwise construct CSS, pass in as a string and have it reparsed to change element styles. But at least it is native!
It also failed because it took ages to release anything useful. It took years, and suddenly smartphones were upon us all, and OLPC shrunk from a special niche to a tiny niche.
What's worse, they made a "throbber" effect by string substituting a different color into an SVG, and then reparsing the SVG, for each color it fades through.
That's the kind of coding quality the OLPC project had. That's why it failed, and it probably also factored into why they disabled the view source button.