[X3D-Public] X3D browsers supporting DOM?

[Johannes Behr]

You are right. The DOM has major issues (not just security) but the
HTML5/W3C people are aware of those and the work hard to solve this problems. 
This is nothing specific to X3DOM.

The DOM is also not the ideal interface to communicate with
a dynamic and live scene-graph but it's the central data-structure 
for todays web-application.

X3DOM does not try to be the perfect runtime and solution for
all X3D application out there but it tries to provide declarative
3D directly to web-applicatoin developer utilizing an interface
they already know: The DOM.

best regards
johannes

> 
> On Jan 4, 2010, at 4:10 PM, Don Brutzman wrote:
> 
>> Charles Lamb wrote:
>>> FreeWRL is wonderfully close.  All that I see is missing is the JavaScript
>>> DOM integration in the Windows version.  I haven't checked out the other
>>> platform versions but I assume they have JavaScript DOM integration.
>> 
>> actually i would not assume DOM integration since it is not a requirement
>> and (way back in the day) was bitterly opposed due to performance reasons.
>> 
>> obviously Javascript performance is much better now.  Joe Williams recently
>> posted an interesting video about this.  Further we learned at the
>> November W3C Tech Plenary that at least 4 of the 5 major browsers
>> (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera) are perfecting high-performance
>> javascript engines.
>> 
> 
> Until we get better ways to manipulate the DOM, including security, DOM should be avoided, IMHO.  Listen to what D. Crockford suggests in the video below.  How do you protect anything when the DOM can be queried (and modified) for things you want to hide (and protect)?  Don't assume that you are the only thing on the web page.  Imagine what could be done to your Java program if someone could control the classloader--aspect-oriented stuff.
> 
> Here's the interesting quote I see: "Basically, we'll have Caja's strength native in the language itself, which would be a wonderful thing. We still have to fix the DOM, because the DOM is still crap, but at least there's a good chance we can fix the language now. The DOM, incidentally, is going in exactly the opposite direction of what we need in order to make it safe for all of us, so that's another problem."
> 
>> http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford-yuiconf2009-state
>> (interesting quote:  "javascript is world's most popular programming language")
>> 
> 
> Becoming more popular every minute.  And there are ways to write JavaScript and stay in your language of choice.  Stuff like Caja/ES5 and related technologies make JavaScript more secure.  We need a Caja-like thing for the DOM.
> 
> I don't know of the intellectual property rights of Caja.  We would have to check that out.  Probably the first place to look is ECMAScript 5, if it has been ratified.  Here is another link to do something similar in Java: http://code.google.com/p/joe-e/
> 
>> Wondering, based on your question Charles:  should we keep track of
>> X3D browser support for DOM on our "Player support for X3D components"
>> conformance wiki?
>> 
>> http://www.web3d.org/x3d/wiki/index.php/Player_support_for_X3D_components
>> 
>> Test reports for what broswers support DOM are welcome.
> 
> DOM is a bad thing for security.  I welcome browsers that don't support DOM.
> 
> No, I don't think we should have access control lists on DOM.  That would be ridiculous!  Let's use something like file descriptors in Linux--an opaque pointer to a resource that has permissions attached to the pointer.  Perhaps what is needed for X3D is a way to prevent Routes from being added/modified where the author didn't intend it.
> 
> John "Don't sign up for X3DOOM" Carlson
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--
Dr. Johannes Behr
Leiter Projektbereich VR

Fraunhofer-Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD
Fraunhoferstr. 5  |  64283 Darmstadt  |  Germany
Tel +49 6151 155-510  |  Fax +49 6151 155-196
johannes.behr at igd.fraunhofer.de  |  www.igd.fraunhofer.de