Khronos Launches Initiative For Standards-Based 3-D Web Content 117
xororand writes "The initiative called 'Accelerated 3D on the web' has been formed by the Khronos consortium with the goal to define an open standard for 3D content on the web, using OpenGL and ECMAscript, as it was suggested by Mozilla developers. 'The Khronos(TM) Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an "Accelerated 3D on Web" working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months.'
Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards, and the increasing performance of ECMAscript engines."
This is awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been trying to figure out how to get web pages to load slower. There are only so many things you can add to a page before you run out of ideas, and as cool as it is, the falling snow effect looks stupid 3 out of 12 months a year.
Yeah I know it has real potential for some serious implementations, but we all know that you're just going to have 3d rotating logs, 3d menus and other such junk more than anything else.
Cool (Score:2)
Anyway, this could be really nice in AJAX-type apps... I'm thinking of things like iTunes album view, visualizers(?), touch screen stuff, interesting GUIs for Flickr-type apps... there are a lot of good appl
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This is hinted at in the HTML5 [whatwg.org] spec. Vladimir Vukicevic has already created a 3D Firefox Add-on [mozilla.org] that extends <canvas> with an OpenGL ES context; and others are working on a javascript library that aims to make make Canvas 3D development easier [c3dl.org].
Re:This is awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
You can laugh at this, but I'm eagerly awaiting the day were all those flash-based games are replaced by javascript games using that 3D canvas.
Imagine that ! No silly and unsecure plugin to download, a truely open standard available on smartphones as well as desktops, and fully integrated with the DOM content (i.e. can interect with the rest of the web page, unlike flash which is restrained to its sandbox).
This is awesome, you're right.
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I'm not laughing at it. I'm cringing at the almost certain misuse.
Re:This is awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
Cinge? No flinch when that stupid monkey from the banner add starts throwing virtual 3D poop at you.
Does anything really think that if every browser out there had this capability the advertisers wont stuff this into their adds like popups are used now?
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And we'll be able to block it faster than you can say 'flashblock.'
Actually, I expect this will be something you have to enable from the get-go. OpenGL in emulation could bog down even a top of the line computer if advertisers do any sort of misuse.
I originally installed Flashblock on my older single-core 2.8ghz celeron because having a modest number of tabs (~8) with flash ads going would cause my CPU usage to hit 80%. That's enough to keep the fan spinning pretty high.
I suspect any use of OpenGL would cau
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I seriously doubt that Microsoft will put that into the default configuration of IE11 or whatever version this function gets delivered in, it would reduce their ability to sell coding toolkits for the 3D function to the market.
No, whenever this is seen as a 'good' thing by the big browsers (IE, Safari, FF) the default will be to allow this junk, and most of the 'normal' people who use the inter-tubes dont know how to download a FireFox extension, much less probe the depths of Internet explorer's preferences
UI Innovation Naysayers (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the dawn of man, every UI innovation has been poo-poo'd by the old guard.
When GUI's came out, people said that it was faster to use old keypunch machines. And perhaps it was, at first, but the operators had to be much more skilled and took longer to train.
When browser-based apps came out, a lot of people said that we're all better off with thick client apps that can have a more responsive UI.
Flash and Javascript, people complain about their misuse. But how they're misused is missing the point compar
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When browser-based apps came out, a lot of people said that we're all better off with thick client apps that can have a more responsive UI.
There are those of us that STILL say that... and we're right!
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Get ready to download 65mb of textures before you can click "Download" on a 3D toolbar to start the search for your video card driver! The future is now! If you're lucky your browser won't crash halfway though.
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> No silly and unsecure plugin to download
"silly" is a judgement call, but "unsecure" is a claim that can be backed with evidence (or not).
so why don't you point us to all the security flaws in Flash that have been exploited in meaningful ways.
go ahead... we'll wait.
(...crickets chirping...)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
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Yeah. Now that your cellphone has a 3D acceleration chip in it (and can run Quake 3), the use of a 3D interface to the Web is... still stupid.
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AFAIK no Browser supports VRML, you need a plugin. [nist.gov]
That's possibly the reason no-one supports it, you might as well write your 3d graphics in silverlight to get a better userbase.
Hopefully, this will get an implementation embedded in Firefox and Chrome and then we'll see widespread adoption - especially if Google makes its apps 3d.
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Re:This is awesome! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
With a ton of intranet apps being developed to run in the browser, why not add this capability?
Well, in a slight change of topic, one issue with adding this capability is security.
It seems this is basically a thin wrapper around OpenGL (ES). That means we'd be giving arbitrary code in web pages basically direct access to OpenGL drivers, which opens up an entire new world of potential exploits: OpenGL drivers are big and complicated, and have never really been put in such a position (typical OpenGL apps are programs you download and run, which anyhow already have access to your computer).
Valgrind much? (Score:2)
There are lots of automated tools that can be used to exercise these APIs for safety. Many of them did not exist when the previous generation of these standards was proposed.
You are obviously running AdBlock+ (Score:3, Informative)
but we all know that you're just going to have 3d rotating logs, 3d menus and other such junk more than anything else.
Ok. Obvisouly, your favorite browser FireFox and you're using AdBlock+ and/or noscript on a regular basis.
Just turn them off for 10 minutes and try to surf the web. Keep sharp and pointed object away from you as you might get tempted to gouge your eyes in the process.
Yes, probably a couple of geocities- and myspace- like pages will get useless 3d gizmos.
But the most massive usage that the other users of the web are going to endure are even more obtrusive animated advertisements. (As if full-screen out-of-th
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If you build it, they will come. I share the same frustration with computers too. I get what I'm thinking is a great computer (hardware wise) and then the OS comes so overbloated to render it equally as fast my 486SX computer running Windows 95. Thanks. For once can we evolve to makes things faster, not use all available resources that make inevitably slower.
This is a fish looking for a bicycle (Score:1)
Sure it sounds cool, but what the hell is it going to do with it?
Call em strange, but I prefer my 2d displays to be 2d
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You simply aren't creative enough.
In the spring and summer, just change them to "rising flowers". In autumn, to blown leaves.
Oh, and for slowing down pages, just create an infinite stream of plug-ins with giant dimensions. Something like this: applet, flash, image, applet, flash, image, applet, flash, image, etc.
With 16k * 16k pixels size each.
Of course my elinks still would kick that site's ass, so be sure to add at least a terabyte of pure-text-compatible styled HTML entities and content late in the page
plugins (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers? I don't even think putting ogg in the browser was a good idea!
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Havent you heard? The Browser is the OS now. This way the large vertically integrated software companies can deliver their entire panoply of junk software to us through the browser and we get to pay a monthly priviledge^H^H^H^H subscription for access.
Not sure how bad this is for the OSS movement however, creating the ever more complex rich user-interface environments is not the stuff of one guy in his mother's closet writing code - it takes real artists, human-interface studies, and more, to make the stu
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I think that the reason why firefox takes more resources to run than early 90's operating systems might be evidence of the fact that having the browser do all might not be the best.
Funny. I'd rather have Firefox implement a Flash-like subsystem, which could reuse its existing scripting and rendering framework, than have something like Flash which has to essentially build that entire framework from the ground up... poorly.
Or: Firefox + 2D/3D rendering can't *possibly* be any worse than the shitpile that is
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Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers? I don't even think putting ogg in the browser was a good idea!
Creating something as a Web standard does not mean browser makers have to incorporate it as part of the core browser. If you want a stripped down browser that needs a plug-in to implement more resource intensive Web standards, nobody is stopping you.
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Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers?
Uh, why? Just because?
I mean, the browser already does accelerated 2D rendering in the form of CSS-decorated HTML. And SVG+Javascript covers quite a bit of the Flash playbook. So why not go all the way and give it the capability to do generalized, accelerated 2D and 3D rendering? We've already got the shitpile that is Flash... at least by embedding this capability in the browser itself, you get a standard implementation a
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I'd settle for being able to tell the browser to tell Flash to stop using 100% CPU.
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> So why not go all the way and give it the capability to do generalized, accelerated 2D and 3D rendering?
Because it would be easier for a 3D app vendor to wrap a browser around their 3D engine than the other way around. Much like how Intel got scared as 3D cards rocketed by their processors in capacitor density and so on, such that a Pentium core became something they might one day just tuck into the corner of their chips.
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Because it would be easier for a 3D app vendor to wrap a browser around their 3D engine than the other way around.
Umm... and that solves the same problem, how, exactly? The whole point, here, is that there are a class of web applications that could really use 3D rendering, but don't have access to the necessary APIs. So you're going to have to expose some kind of API to the Javascript universe, and if you're doing that, you're most of the way to putting a 3D engine (and I use the term "engine" loosely...
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Erm shouldn't fancy stuff like 3d acceleration be handled by plug-ins not browsers? I don't even think putting ogg in the browser was a good idea!
Why not put it in both? I mean, you should not put all your oggs in one basket.
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Better do it with Flash ?
It isn't about 3D content. 3D acceleration can give some mice graphics without locking content in a plug-ins or an image.
WEB-Designer won't learn Open-GL. But they would use JQuery-3D.
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Seriously the line on what formats are natively supported will keep shifting. First gif/jpeg then png without plugins. Then theres SVG (do you need a plugin?) etc . As for a moving pictures format, once images were added I found it strange that a movie codec wasn't.
But of course! (Score:1)
On the other hand... (Score:2)
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Re:But of course! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because standardizing web content has worked so very well thus far. This should take right off and just roll. No problems whatsoever. Yep.
Obviously there has been one particular company working hard to hold back Web standards. That said, between legal scrutiny of those actions and the slow erosion of their Web install share to both alternative browsers and alternative platforms (e.g. smartphones) standards are becoming both more important and more applied.
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One of the big problems, though, is getting said masses to go along with it. There're a certain number of individuals out there that just don't want to play nice. They want to do things their way, regardless of what "standards" the majorities want to enforce. The internet's a big place, and it's tough to get everyone in it to follow
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The internet's a big place, and it's tough to get everyone in it to follow the rules.
Not really. Any of them that don't have overwhelming market share in a pertinent market are kept in line by the market, as in they lose money and install base when they break compatibility. All that really needs to be done is enforce current antitrust laws against any player who tries leveraging dominance in another market to undermine this process.
VRML For the Win! (Score:3, Insightful)
Man, I miss people asking for VRML galleries and stores. The same way I miss getting kicked in the head repeatedly.
Back to the 90s? (Score:2)
Man, I miss people asking for VRML galleries and stores. The same way I miss getting kicked in the head repeatedly.
I had the same reaction. And it was just SOOOOO successful last time we went down this road.
That being said, the hardware is about two orders of magnitude more powerful than it was in the 90s. I can now do 3D visualizations in Java that would have been difficult in C on dedicated hardware back then.
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I had the same reaction. And it was just SOOOOO successful last time we went down this road.
That being said, the hardware is about two orders of magnitude more powerful than it was in the 90s.
It wasn't unsuccessful because it was slow. It was unsuccessful because it was USELESS (for all but gaming or 3d CAD purposes).
Last time around in the late 90s I fooled around with making 3d-graphical visualizations of data. Turned out to be totally useless.
Maybe virtual pr0n. Maybe. Other than pr0n, gaming, and some CAD, what good is it?
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I don't completely disagree but I think that is only one issue.
I would argue that it failed because:
Even today there is no single overriding standard for distributing interactive 3D visualizations on the web or otherwise.
these guys obviously are doomed to repeat... (Score:2)
what exactly does this have over VRML ?
why not build a VRML into the browser then ?
regards
John Jones
Just what we need (Score:1)
Even more bandwidth draining marketing weenie tools to make websites 'interactive'! Eleventy!
I'm highly confident that soon we will see a proliferation of meaningless uses of this technology to further anger the denizens of FaceBook (you broke my homepage) and turn every formerly useful information site into an impossible to navigate hash.
Clean web page design with usability studies and simplistic HTML+CSS works very well, just like what you're looking at here on Slashdot - do you really think that the onl
I See A Vision, A Vision of ... ActiveX (Score:2)
I think it's useful to develop an open web 3d standard, despite the dancing GIF animations it brings to mind. What I foresee is either MS or MS sock puppet(s) getting a seat at the table. Suddenly, "Open" ActiveX is the solution.
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I'm not sure it'll give rise to "dancing gif" syndrome, but more a replacement for SVG. Then we get better graphics than downloaded compressed bitmaps, and the possibility of doing a lot more in the browser. That's especially important as the browser moves towards being the desktop.
Unfortunately, I see MS getting in there too, even if they're not interested in the technology - its a standard that isn't directX, oh noes - and just want to strangle it or implement their own 'mostly' compatible version with so
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Promoting Members [khronos.org] and Contributing Members [khronos.org] of Khronos Group [khronos.org]
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Unfortunately, I see MS getting in there too, ...
No but when Mozilla and Web-Kit would have 3D canvas, you would be happy to see Microsoft pushing silver light 3 by automatic update...
(and use a nice JavaScript library to bridge the gap)
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I'm not sure it'll give rise to "dancing gif" syndrome, but more a replacement for SVG.
Why do we need a replacement for SVG? On the other hand, if it is for animating SVGs, why wouldn't it give rise to "dancing GIF" syndrome?
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I think it's useful to develop an open web 3d standard, despite the dancing GIF animations it brings to mind. What I foresee is either MS or MS sock puppet(s) getting a seat at the table. Suddenly, "Open" ActiveX is the solution.
Umm, do you have any idea who the Khronos group is? It's Apple, Sun, Id, Creative, Sony, Intel, AMD/ATI, and NVIDIA among others. They make OpenGL and pretty much all of them have a vested interest in keeping the standards open and usable by everyone and NOT controlled by Microsoft. The main purpose behind Khronos these days is to provide a usable alternative to DirectX.
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Umm, do you have any idea who the Khronos group is?
Yes! We are Klingons!
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Sun? They're pretty late to the party, and we're not sure they're on board. But Apple? Creative? Nvidia? SONY?!?!?! You hold these guys up as pillars of openness?!?!?
We weren't discussing openness. We were discussing the possibility raised by the previous poster about making this standard into an MS controlled ActiveX based technology. Sony has a terrible record on openness in general, but they rarely if ever support closed technologies controlled by others, especially Microsoft. Sony also has a vested interest in some standards, such as OpenGL which they have been a good citizen with regard to.
What the hell have you been smoking that makes you believe that the makers/backers of itunes/ipod, BD+, pervertors of the CD standard have any interest in making things open and accessible to everyone?!?!
All of these companies have a history of promoting open standards for techn
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No, no, Open ActiveX won't work. Open is out and Microsoft already has the DirectX brand for 3D stuff...Let's see....
iDirectX? No, don't wanna ge sued by Apple
ActiveDirectX? Too confusing...
Web DirectX? Nahhhh...it ain't 1997 anymore.
DirectX Live? Probably would get confused with Xbox360 Live...
Oh, I know!
DirectX Cloud Edition!
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This does not work that way. Microsoft sits in the consortium, then rips out the ideas and implements 90% of it incompatible under their own umbrella and nails everything they can grab with patents.
Then you have to wait at least 10 years until you get a half working standards implementation from them. Works that way every time. See CSS2, Dom Level2, SVG (which currently is named differently and works only in Silverlight in their 90% fully incompatible implementation), Windows Media 9 etc...
The list of those
Oh yeah, open standards always = success (Score:2)
Unlike previous attempts to establish 3D standards for the web, this one might be actually successful due to the use of existing open standards...
In 12 months--hell, I'll give them 24, so they've got a year for implementations after the standard is set--I imagine the success of this will be somewhere between that of VRML and SVG.
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Yeah, I got all excited about the 3-D aspect. I thought perhaps this would finally let me reach through the Internet and punch loudmouth jerks right in the windpipe. Seems not yet. Pity.
Re:I'm being pedantic today, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pedantic is one thing, just plain wrong is another.
"Content" is logical, not physical, and therefore this statement is wrong. And the web isn't a 2d surface (or any other kind of surface), so even if the statement was true so far as it goes, it would still be irrelevant to whether there can be 3D content on the Web. And since the human visual system uses a pair of 2D sensors to synthesize a 3-dimensional model of the portion of the universe seen, its pretty clear that you can present as good of a presentation of 3D content as humans can deal with using via 2D images, provided you do it just right. And, of course, you can do 2D projections from a 3D model even with one 2D surface, with quite useful results (and, if you deliver the 3D model to the user agent, which then performs whatever requested manipulations the user wants, with a whole lot less latency than if the server had to generate 2D images from a 3D object model and send them over the wire in response to queries for different views of the same model from the same user agent.)
You confuse presentation mechanisms with content.
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You're not being 'pedantic', you're being 'incorrect'. How do you think they get fancy effects like "being able to look at things from any angle"? It is actually 3D, even if it's rendered in 2D for display on the screen.
What next, a coffeemaker? (Score:1)
In your face advertising on steroids? (Score:1)
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well if what happens in SecondLife sometimes happens
the advertising is not just on steroids but on CDC lab grade acid and Meth and Enough steroids to put a blue whale in RoidRage.
Khronos? (Score:1)
Open source 3D web has already begun (Score:2, Informative)
Tired, TIRED of 3D (Score:4, Insightful)
Went to see Coraline last weekend. Good movie, but the best thing I can say about its use of 3D is that it didn't get in the way. Mostly.
All these idiots who keep pushing 3D media at us. WE DON'T WANT IT. It doesn't make anything "more real". Quite the opposite. Since you can never do it completely right with anything resembling current media, you end up with a lot of half-baked complications (the "foreground" objects in Coraline often look like cardboard cutouts) that make it that much harder to immerse yourself in the movie, the GUI, or whatever.
(When you invent a completely new medium in which 3D makes sense, like those "holodecks" on Star Trek, get back to us.)
And as for GUIs, they make interaction more complicated. The whole point of GUIs is to make interaction simpler. If I want to keep track of a lot of extraneous detail, I'll use a CLI.
I write hardware manuals for a living, and there are some people at our company who want us to start embedding 3D interactive models in the PDF versions of our manuals. If I thought this proposal was going to go anywhere (we don't even have enough resources to do more basic authoring easily) I'd be very noisily opposing it. Lots of extra work, all to make using our manuals a little more difficult. No thanks.
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you would need to install acrobat to pick up the Atmosphere bits to do the 3d stuff
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Uh, where do you get stop motion == cardboard cutouts? In fact, all Henry Selick movies use elaborate models.
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Where did I even mention OpenGL?
Existing addon? (Score:1, Interesting)
I would rather.. (Score:1)
..an automatic way - an option- for webpages (with some "standards" sort of code) to automatically redirect-based on the viewers settings- to the opposite of 3D live motion spinning and whatnot full flash full bloat page, to the low res/print this page version. It is really bogus when all you want is the text, but you have to load the full bloat version *just* to find the "print this article" link. That sort of defeats the purpose. Images off and noscript and ABP helps, but that still isn't enough.
Maybe thi
Ways to put 3D content on the Web. (Score:2)
There are already plenty of ways to put "3D on the Web".
Name (Score:1)
Mr. Document meet Mr. Hack (Score:4, Informative)
I for one look forward to a day when the web is a more dynamic environment, where information is presented more fluidly instead relying on the old metaphor of static published pages, but I can't believe this is a sane way forward. It seems like instead of looking for a better way to present information they're just duct taping crap onto the same old model. Kind of like achieving flight by strapping a rocket motor to horse drawn carriage.
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There's a lot of duct tape crap, I'll admit. But the current system has a lot of pretty solid ideas and systems that work well, too. For example, HTTP, and the general stateless nature of the web works great. Proxies, and caching, and other supporting technologies are actually pretty good or at least work really well.
Ajax sucks and is kludgey. But really I don't even notice, even though I code with it every day. That's because I've got it all abstracted away into super easy to use libraries. Lots of it
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If I would start from scratch, I probably would kill the entire http post get aspects and would make everything get only with unlimited length of the get content!
Why they even made this distinction is beyound me!
Besides that I would add subsegment isolation to the dom so that there is a base for a real component set. I would probably stay on javascript for the dynamic binding, but would start off with EcmaScript 4 so that real inheritance and namespaces are added! (Tell me what you will the current state of
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Read. [wikipedia.org]
No offense, but if you're not using the POST method for actions with side-effects, you're doing it wrong.
Note that HTTP has all the CRUD [wikipedia.org] methods and then some (though most servers are configured to make do with POST and GET). In any case, doing everything with GET is dangerous and wrong.
Imo, RESTful systems are the way to go, and the web should remain stateless. In other words, HTTP is great.
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Great so now we have rest which is basically a workaround arund the limitations of http get and it tries to squeeze everything into get.
The biggest issue is that get itself is length limited which makes it hard to get a state into unlimited length forms...
As for post it would not be needed in systems with a real socket interface and a decent connection to it. (you could also name http post a subset of what I am thinking of)
The entire http protocol is fundamentally broken in this regard and systems of around
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With respect, I disagree. People have a lot of definitions for REST, but I don't think yours is totally accurate. REST uses all of the HTTP methods. The workarounds for PUT and DELETE are because of specific servers not supporting them.
Session cookies do not break the REST model. Even when people use the url to pass state, it doesn't contain the state itself, just an id (plenty of room for that). And REST has the bonus of gracefully accommodating people like me (and probably you) who hack the url when the a
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We call that "gopher".
You mean accelerate VRML? (Score:2)
Whatever happened to VRML? I remember seeing some examples of this years ago.
...*googles*... wikipedia....enlightenment!
VRML [wikipedia.org] has turned into X3D [wikipedia.org]. Of course! It had to be XML'ified.
Why not accelerate this?
Actually, I'm not even sure that I want accel 3D in my browser. I have enough issues with graphics drivers OUTSIDE of the browser without making the browser crash too...
ws
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I was going to mention those two previous technologies; but you beat me to it.
I used to play around with VRML quite a bit. What I took away from its failure to be widely adopted was that performance matters more than standardization for 3-d enthusiasts.
"opera-3d" canvas context (Score:2)
Its not clear to me from the press release how this differs from Opera's experimental "opera-3d" canvas context [opera.com].
What is really needed is a high-level format for storing 3D models, with easy software for content creation and importing models from existing 3D modelers. There have been attempts to do this before, VRML and Adobe's acrobat reader both support 3D. Nobody really uses it outside of a few specialized fields.
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There is a high level format like the one you speak of. COLLADA [wikipedia.org] another open standard managed by the Khronos group. Many 3D authoring applications and game engines support this format, and I would not be at all surprised if they chose COLLADA as the format for transferring geometry in this new 3D web standard.
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COLLADA is pretty great, though it's pretty tough to generate. I always end up using Blender or SketchUp to get a rough idea of what the tree is going to look like before I write the code (seems to be more efficient than wading through the docs).
Also, COLLADA does a lot more than represent 3D models...
You probably already know this, but for those who don't: COLLADA is also the format used for models in Google Earth.
RTFA? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow. This is the most uninformed discussion I've seen in years.
This has nothing to do with markup (VRML, x3D, etc). It is about the browser exposing an opengl API to javascript.
According to TFA, it's Mozilla that is proposing building the functionality into a browser (but it could be any other ecmascript container). Since Mozilla is contributing to the standard (and started the initiative), we should expect this to absorb Canvas:3D (i.e., this is not a redundancy).
This standardization is a Good Thing. Everyone's concerns about advertisers abusing this should be directed towards advertisers, not this totally useful idea. Also, noscript rocks.
To all who think javascript just sucks, you don't know how to use it. Stop using it like it's C.
And if it replaces that leaky, closed, insecure, inaccessible, non-semantic and patent-encumbered plugin that almost killed the Web, awesome. With any luck, it'll kill DirectX too.
Remember 3DML...? (Score:1)
It's about time (Score:2)
After many years, the #1 most commonly used application will finally have direct access to the fancy rendering hardware we paid so much for.
Do it NOW (Score:2)
It seem like one could use swig or a similar tool and get this working very quickly.
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