There’s a great trend to move everything online these days. It’s not exactly clear if this is a good thing in all circumstances, but everyone’s getting on the bandwagon and there’s no reversing it at this point. One problem, a big one, with doing everything in a browser is that the performance and functionality sees a significant dive. On the performance front, there’s been a lot of attention to JavaScript speed in browsers, and on the functionality one, we have the WebGL project which aims to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to browsers. Development is moving fast and the standard has been released in draft form with a finalized version possibly coming in early 2010.
“Even without a draft specification of WebGL in circulation, we’ve seen some promising 3D content using WebGL appear on the web, put together mainly through developer ingenuity and the fact that Firefox, Chromium, and WebKit are open source projects with early support for the technology,” Arun Ranganatha, chairman of the WebGL working group and standards evangelist at Mozilla, wrote. “Today, the WebGL Working Group at Khronos released a provisional public draft of the WebGL specification, and we are very excited for what this means for the web.”
The WebGL standard is under the supervision of the Khronos Group, a consortium of indust… (read more)