3D APIs are coming to the Web in force
Written by on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 in 2461.
There have been a few posts on the news that “in response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an ‘Accelerated 3D on Web’ working group that Mozilla has offered to chair.”
Chris Blizzard (Director of Evangelism for Mozilla, and top chap) has some really good comments:
We’ve started to see more and more libraries being built to support use cases with Canvas in a 2D context but we really want to take things to the next level and start to allow people to use 3D capabilities as well. Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every web browser vendor means that we’re going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open web technologies. 3D is a huge part of that story and we’re happy to bring our proposal to the table.
The proposed spec (found in one of vlad’s post on 3D Canvas) is a pretty light wrapper on top of OpenGL ES 2.0, with some changes to support some JavaScript pleasantries. OpenGL ES is a decent starting point, which is why we picked it. OpenGL is supported as part of every major operating system and in it’s being picked up as a standard on mobile devices as well. Compared to the full OpenGL spec, the ES variant is a smaller subset that reflects the reality of what’s being used on the ground and most hardware and software vendors have actually been re-tooling to support OpenGL ES with support for older versions of full OpenGL emulated on top of OpenGL ES. Mixed with the fact that there’s a decent amount of knowledge out there in the industry of how to use OpenGL, we think that this smooths the integration between the current set of OpenGL users and larger web developer community.
And, there is the link back to Vladimir Vuki?evi?, the engineer who did the initial work (and who has been a huge help for Ben and I at Mozilla wrt Canvas and much more).
This is great stuff, and is it is important to clarify that this isn’t about 3D virtual worlds, like some people think. This isn’t VRML. The iPhone and the Mac are doing really nice 3D effects all the time these days. Close a window in OS X / Vista. Launch and quit Time Machine.
I am also glad to see OpenGL ES instead of yet another attempt at doing the 3D. There are a lot of tools and mindshare around this, and people will build great libraries on top of it I am sure for particular niches (apply some effects etc) and maybe we can get some uplift to CSS itself 
Oh, and i am really glad to see Google involved too!
I also saw Ryan Stewart weighing in and liked some of what he had to say, but was surprised by:
So it’s unfortunate to see that even the browser vendors have given up on moving the open web forward through standards. Whether it’s the WHATWG versus the W3C or the trials and tribulations of actually implementing HTML5, things are very broken and everyone is moving on regardless. I don’t blame any of them, but it doesn’t seem like it’s good for web developers.
Standards groups aren’t the place to innovate. Browsers should be creating compelling features, other browsers should copy the good ones, and then we can standardize. XMLHttpRequest wasn’t grown in the W3C. The cool CSS ideas that have been implemented in multiple browsers recently weren’t either. Browsers need to push more, not less. And, then we need the standards groups to rally and try to turn the -vendor-bar-baz into bar-baz. Giving Web developers more APIs is good for Web developers!
Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/IXayJUEe1Bk/3d-apis-are-coming-to-the-web-in-force