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

[Chris Marrin]

On Jan 6, 2011, at 11:42 AM, Dmitri Rubinstein wrote:

> Chris Marrin schrieb:
>> On Jan 5, 2011, at 4:32 PM, Dmitri Rubinstein wrote:
>>> Chris Marrin schrieb:
>>>> On Jan 5, 2011, at 11:15 AM, Joe D Williams wrote:
>>>>>> (such as XFlow, server-based rendering based on XML3D, AnySL and its successor AnyDSL
>>>>> Is there anything public on AnyDSL?
>>>>> What is the best link for XFlow?
>>>>> What is Khronos association with ASL?
>>>> I don't think this group should be trying to blaze the trail with new shader languages. We actually considered that in WebGL and decided instead to support a very strict version of GLSL ES 1.0. To make all this work with HLSL (via the translators in ANGLE) we tightened up a few requirements of the underlying system. As GLSL ES progresses with more of the desktop functionality, we can rev the WebGL spec. So I think you should consider the shading language a solved problem.
>>> Is it really solved ? How do you want to combine GLSL with ray tracers like NVIDIA's OptiX or our RTfact ? Ray tracers are real time now, what native XML3D browser clearly demonstrate. And making GLSL as the only shading language for 3D in Web couples it tightly with rasterization rendering techniques. This was already a big problem with VRML and X3D, when we wanted to connect it with our real time ray tracer.
>> Experiments and science are wonderful things. But this is engineering, and our work has to work on a wide variety of hardware and OS configurations. One day non-rasterization rendering techniques might be mainstream. But that day is not today.
> 
> I don't think that real time ray tracing is just a science, since everybody can run it on a today hardware (I understand this as mainstream). You don't need anymore a cluster of PCs or dedicated hardware. And also a hardware power of GPUs and CPUs grows every year, so it will be faster and faster. So when I am a customer and have already 3D in a browser, and I also have an app that can render me this 3D in a real-time without a browser then I will ask a question: Why it doesn't work within the browser ?

So you're saying that my iPhone can do real-time raytracing? Or my 4 year old ATI graphics card? I've seen nice demos of ray-tracing in a fragment shader, and I know new Nvidia (and presumably ATI) is very powerful and have the potential to do ray-tracing much faster. But that's not mainstream. 

> 
> When this is somehow engineering problem, and we also discussing engineering details here (Do we ?), then let me ask you engineering question:
> Why not add into a browser a more sophisticated plugin API that allows a plugin to provide a native implementation for elements of an arbitrary XML namespace and propagating all events like DOM changes and CSS information into plugin. Combined with direct access to OpenGL's 3D context, and I think this is already available via NPAPI:Pepper, this should be enough to implement scene graph engine without modifying a browser. Then the decision what to support and how 3D DOM should look like is up to the plugin author.

The single most important aspect of a web browser isn't power or performance or even feature set. It is security. Every browser vendor rails against plugins because it opens the browser to intentional and unintentional security breaches. When discovered, the only recourse the browser has is to send out an update which blacklists the guilty plugin. The user sees his or her web application suddenly stop working because of this and so they blame the browser, not the plugin vendor. 

Adding a feature like WebGL to the browser is done to add features and performance to be sure. But more importantly, it allows the browser to control the security of that component.

Allowing plugin access to a bare OpenGL context is another huge security issue. OpenGL was not designed to be hardened against attacks. We are just now working with vendors to add these capabilities. So I don't see any possibility of opening the internal workings of the browser to any 3rd party plugins.

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~Chris
chris at marrin.com