[x3d-public] X3D V4 Draft Requirements Proposal

[Leonard Daly]

Last week there was a bit of conversation on the 3D WG list about 
requirements. I am sending my contribution on the topic of X3D V4 
requirements to the public list to get increased conversation. Note that 
this is NOT the product of the WG and I am not claiming that these are 
final. This is only a personal early draft of requirements for X3D 
running in a web browser environment. Please feel free to discuss or 
propose additions/changes to this list.


*Requirements*
Boundary conditions: This is just for X3D running in a web browser and 
integrated with HTML. If there is X3D outside of this limitation, these 
requirements may or may not apply.

Note: Some of these requirements may overlap by varying amounts. It was 
easier to specify them this way then trying to make a complete and 
non-overlapping set. I'm not going to even claim that this is a complete 
set, but it is a beginning.

For those that want XHTML, then convert all references to HTML to XHTML 
and make the appropriate syntax changes. The differences between HTML 
and XHTML in the appearance of the elements and attributes is that XHTML 
is strict. This amounts to closing elements, elements and attributes are 
lower case, mandatory elements and attributes, different MIME type 
(text/html vs. application/xml or applications/xhtml+xml), and quoted 
attributes -- see https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_xhtml.asp for 
details. The WhatWG has a pretty good documentation page on the 
differences at https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/HTML_vs._XHTML.


1) Look "like" HTML (5).
   a) Elements (nodes in X3D-speak) shall be case independent
   b) Attributes (fields in X3D-speak) shall be case independent
   c) X3D nodes shall not have name conflicts with any HTML-defined elements
   d) All X3D nodes shall support all HTML Global Attributes 
(https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_standardattributes.asp)
   e) All X3D fields with the same name as HTML attributes shall behave 
as the HTML element
   f) TBD: Not all style attributes apply to X3D nodes & fields

2) Function "like" HTML (5).
   a) All nodes shall be fully integrated with the DOM [This may need to 
change if certain nodes need to remain hidden from the DOM. For example, 
the manner which X3DOM implements Inline.]
   b) The scene graph does not need to be DOM (or a portion of it).
   c) Changes to the DOM shall be reflected in the scene graph
   d) Changes to the scene graph shall be reflected in the DOM
   e) Events are handled as HTML events
   f) DOM is the external (i.e., from the web page) API to the scene graph

3) X3D shall support the evolving web standards for flat-3D (WebGL), VR 
(WebVR) and AR (nothing yet).

4) Existing features & functionality
   a) Perform the following tasks with the requirements that is be 
conflict with the above
     i) Conduct a review of all existing features (nodes) to determine 
if any should be deprecated in V4
     ii) Conduct a review of all existing functionality (run-time) to 
determine if any should be deprecated or changed in V4
   b) Include all features and functionality that passes the above reviews

5) Additional features shall be added
   a) Deformable-skin joint based animation
   b) Support for multiple geometry formats, including OBJ, glTF
   c) Increased Material support with a standard library of pre-defined 
shaders
   d) Mechanism to navigate a scene without a pointing device
   e) Mechanism to touch or select objects without a pointing device
   f) Review other 3D/VR display technologies (XML3D, A-Frame, GLAM, 
etc.) to determine if there are features that should be included


-- 
*Leonard Daly*
3D Systems & Cloud Consultant
LA ACM SIGGRAPH Chair
President, Daly Realism - /Creating the Future/
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