Today, the WebGL WG at Khronos [1] released a public draft of the WebGL
specification [2], and we really welcome (and need) wide review. Along
with Mozilla folks, the WebGL WG has representatives from Opera, Google,
and Apple, and nightly builds of Firefox, Chromium, and Safari have
support for the draft specification. You can read a bit more about it
in a blog post I wrote here [3]. Essentially, WebGL is an HTML Canvas
context. So you'd invoke it for now using:
// obtain canvas handle
var canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");
gl = canvas.getContext("experimental-webgl");
// Now do cool stuff
The specification is still in draft status, so stuff will change, and
your feedback is welcome :) We've already seen some compelling use of
JavaScript libraries that straddle WebGL come out, such as X3DOM [4]. I
expect to see more of that going forward, since WebGL is a pretty low
level API that wraps OpenGL ES 2.0, with some concessions made for how
JavaScript works (since OpenGL ES 2.0 is essentially a C API). The
WebGL Wiki [5] has details on how you can test it in the browsers that
support it.
I expect we'll want to have technical discussions about the Canvas API
in general following this release, but for now this is an informative
heads-up.
Season's greetings, etc.,
-- A*
[1] WebGL homepage: http://webgl.org/
[2] Draft Specification:
https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/doc/spec/WebGL-spec.html
[3] Blog post: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/
[4] X3DOM, an XML interchange for 3D data that uses WebGL: http://x3dom.org
[5] WebGL Wiki: http://khronos.org/webgl/wiki
