One quick example of a workflow from base R plots to interactive SVG. An early pioneer in this is Duncan Temple Lang @duncantl with his XML and SVGAnnotation packages and his great book XML and Web Technologies for Data Sciences with R coauthored with Deborah Nolan. He demonstrates some examples with various base and grid plots here.
I think this is a very good example of amazing work just slightly ahead of its time. Now with d3, browser improvements, and javascript evolution, I think the time is right for this to progress and evolve into something powerful but expected.
There are infinite improvements that can be done to this example.