[X3D-Public] Fwd: Re: [X3D] X3D HTML5 meeting discussions: Declarative 3D interest group at W3C

[Johannes Behr]

Hi,

>> 
>> One of the reasons why we started the XG is, because we think that the HTML integration is the main focus point. It's not about ratifying X3D spec, X3DOM or XML3D. I think we have an excellent starting point with two approaches (XML3D and X3DOM), WebGL prototypes, native implementations in Chrome and Firefox and several plugin implementations. Thus we have some lessons learned. Now it's time to identify the requirements and based on that, we have to find an optimal solution for the Web. That's why we a looking for industry backup (probably another flaw of X3D) for our initiative and I think we are on a good way. So one topic will be to find a good technical solution, the other to show use-cases for declarative applications and to demonstrate the industry interest.
> 
> We did WebGL in Khronos because we wanted to take advantage of the expertise of the Khronos participants. I think you have good expertise in 3D declarative forms already, but I would recommend you stay close to other W3C efforts to be able to draw on their more general web expertise as well. As a WebKit developer, I would also recommend you pull a WebKit tree and understand it. We already have a cross-platform 3D rendering API (GraphicsContext3D).

This is very interesting but I could find any further documention (just the headers).
Is there already a Scene-Graph API ontop of this GrphicsContext?
Does the OSX-Preview tool utilize this interface while rendering a collada file?

>> 
>> The CSS integration is a tricky thing. It's powerful and well-known. It's perfect for a fixed-function rendering like HTML. But hard to merge this with the programmable 3D pipeline. In the XML3D project we use CSS to assign shaders to geometry but not for the generic shader parameters. I would really like to see a stronger CSS usage. On the other hand it makes it harder to protoype it with JS/WebGL.
> 
> Yes, I don't know the details but I believe this was one of the most difficult parts of X3DOM, and I don't know how much integration they were able to achieve. 

We fully support CSS 3D Transforms and CSS Animations since June 2009.
We implemented it after we had the dicussion on the WebGL list :)

http://x3dom.org/x3dom/example/x3dom_cssTrans.html

We don't use it for material setting (Fixed function or shader) yet for various reasons. 

1) We don't know if this is the right way to do (partial) material overwrites. We believe it's 
better compared to the method other scene-graphs provide but still looking for a use-case
that would not work without a cascading material system.

2) We can not introduce new properties easily. The W3C spec clearly states, that
the UA must not cascade unknown properties. This is something, e.g. older UA did. 

best regards
johannes