“WebGL is basically an initiative to bring 3D graphics into web browsers natively, without having to download any plugins. This is achieved by adding a few things to HTML5, namely, defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 and letting you draw things into a 3D context of the canvas element.” Also see the press release for more details.
Seriously, IE users always end up with so many ridiculous toolbars and other forms of malware – let’s give them an ActiveX plugin that embeds an entire modern browser, so we can stop being required to support IE6! Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
Who cares about IE?
People started leaving Netscape when sites started becoming “optimized for Internet Explorer”. It is now time for sites to be optimized for anything but IE.
They left Netscape when their market share was 5% or less. IE still controls quite a large percentage – even IE6 alone is in the double digits percentages (10-20% on most sites I deal with). It’s really not practical to ditch that browser line yet – but asside from IE6, IE8 still has crap JS performance, and no support for the goodies in html5 (video/audio/canvas/svg) – and still don’t have support for basics like DOM events. They are sitting on the market, wasting time and money of every developer who is forced to support that tired platform, while they refuse to get on board with what so many developers are clearly asking for. MS really must hate their web developers quite a bit.
That is an even awesomer idea than the 3D canvas.
So there is little space for newcomers (more features to be a “standard”) and leave less options for accessibility.
I wonder what would be the advantage of having such feature in an application that is suppose to give text to the user.
The need of a such feature rich browser is hard to see.
Although 3D effect are nice to see time to time it should not be part of the browsing experience.
Well put.
I just can’t wait until there are flashing 3D advertisements in the world wide web. I’ve so missed those.
Architecture? Interior design? Chemical engineering? There are many industries and uses for this technology, just as I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of people with unique ideas on how to use them.
You may not have noticed but it’s become a whole lot more important than that in the past fifteen years. 🙂
I agree on your point of accessibility; being 3d, low-vision sufferers shouldn’t be disadvantaged as the canvas can be scaled without loss of quality. The blind would have a more difficult time and I forsee an opportunity for someone to develop software that can interpret this 3d data into a tactile representation.
You dont think simple 3d toys can really fulfill serious needs do you?
SVG is the what html should’ve been.
The combination of SVG+Javascript+CSS gives us an awesome platform where designers can truly design and developers can truly develop. Machines can read real machine-readables (SVG’s) that to stupid human has touched (is most cases). Real browser compatibility and more.
Pity that we are on the totally wrong direction.
SVG+Javascript+CSS gives us flash five years ago, minus a bunch of nifty things and a cool editor.
I’m thinking of instead of craming everything into one bloated application ( browser that can do fireworks and now in 3d ), these industries should rely on protocol more adapted for their needs and produce application adapted to their field.
WebGL would be bloated for sure, as some designer wouldn’t understand the issue in putting a billion polygon model in the browser because it work like a charm on their computer.
I always assumed that with the growing popularity of mobile web platform we would be back to the basic of a more usable web (whereas everybody was heading either for flash or fitting the website for insane resolutions), I was obviously wrong.
With all the 3D web initiatives, it would be no surprise to see Palm adopt some of them for webOS.