[X3D-Public] HTML5 X3D Working Group Minutes, January 26 2010

[John A. Stewart]

HTML Working Group meeting, January 26 2010

Present: Anita Havele, Joe Williams, Don Brutzman, Len Daly, John  
Stewart
Absent: Johannes Behr.


1) HTML5 Working Group and X3D Integration.

The HTML5 Working Group appears to have issues surrounding decisions  
on external extensibility, centralized extensibility, or no  
extensibility and those discussions are taking up a lot of members'  
time when a final draft has to be published. As such, X3D is part of a  
group of technologies that are not on the top of the list for in-depth  
discussion.

As such, we will have to focus our attentions to:


1) Contact chairs and indicate that we have answered the mail threads,  
got no response and are wondering what they recommend for next steps;  
review web page we published regarding HTML5 centralized extensibility;

2) Consider raising it as an ISSUE in the HTML5 group and brief it  
during one of their weekly calls;

3) Dialogue with HTML browser companies and talk about using X3D so  
that they can make an informed decisions either for now or for the  
future;

4) Work on W3C Member Submission on merits of X3D as a part of HTML5;

5) Make all our examples excellent and repeatable, particularly those  
that are using already established html mechanisms;

6) Possible future work would be writing source code that integrates  
and open source X3D browser with mozilla and webkit.
consider writing source code that extends firefox/webkit with an X3D  
browser.


JohnS: The FreeWRL team is working on the Webkit Plugin code, and  
expect to have another FreeWRL release shortly. (Currently, FreeWRL  
plugins use the old Mozilla API for Plugin Interoperability). In  
particular, DOM access, as outlined in the apple document:

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/DOCUMENTATION/AppleApplications/Conceptual/SafariJSProgTopics/WebKitJavaScript.html

by using incremental steps, it appears possible that FreeWRL will be  
able to run the X3DOM examples once this Webkit-FreeWRL plugin  
integration is complete.


Don; Little disappointing Opera responded passively indicating that  
they would not support X3D, but never responded directly via email.

JohnS: Opera is less than 2% or so of the browser market.


Don: Opera - did they have proper information as to why their decision  
wanted to be?

Don: Would like feedback from Sam Ruby and other chairs. Either they  
have distributed extensibility, centralized extensibility, or no  
extensibility.

Don: We have a foundation for continued efforts with the W3C over time.

Don - There are use cases that are similar to use cases for mathml and  
svg that X3D fits so there is rationale for X3D to embed in HTML5. So,  
documenting these merits is a worthy thing for us to do.

Joe - SVG made it into the spec via schema of


Don - we should work with firefox and webkit


Joe: The X3D browser writers need to work on browser plugin, and  SAI  
integration.





-----------------------------------------------------------
John A. Stewart
Team Leader: Networked Virtual and Augmented Reality
alex.stewart at crc.ca

Network Systems and Technologies -
         Systemes et technologies des reseaux
Communications Research Centre Canada  |
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