Good effort here, I'm working toward a similar goal.
I'm wondering if there would be an easy way to simply force a web browser into the front of the display, and just drive the display through html.
Currently, I'm using the screensaver application to show what I want, by generating the SVG on my server and pulling it through cron, but the screensaver needs a reboot everytime.
What I'm trying to understand is if I can refresh the screen with an image regularily without a reboot.
Any projects that do that?