WebGL is a 3D Graphics API implemented directly into HTML5 browsers that allow 3D Graphics to be created in a Document Object Model (DOM) or a Web Page. If you’ve been reading, a lot of my posts revolve around these new browsers, new operating systems, mobile devices, and future web technologies. Well, WebGL is an essential piece to the HTML5 puzzle.
WebGL will essentially compete against Adobe’s Flash graphics processing. And in my opinion, WebGL will have a major leg up in terms of performance. Basically, the web browser will have the advantages of OpenGL, which it is based on, while using JavaScript. The new web browsers of today directly tie into your computers hardware, utilizing your high end video cards and audio.
There are some small issues to work through:
- Internet Security – We are allowing public code to access our most high end hardware pieces in our system. How will security be enforced? Remember Microsoft’s attempt at ActiveX object control. The web world went through 2 years of web security issues.
- Protecting Developers Code – If all of our 3D web programming code is done in JavaScript, how can we protect what we wrote? OpenGL is highly complex and if the code isn’t properly protected, there will be an infusion of copy-cat’s. One could argue the benefits to this as how Open Source has been incredibly beneficial, but one has to think about the time involved in 3D design work.
- Browser Wars – Here we go again, the browser wars continue. Anyone who has made a web site knows that one of the most involved development tasks is cross-browser compatibility. We have major slices of the pie, between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. And there could be many others whom could spike at any time, such as Opera (Opera Mini) and Konqueror who have been in the game since 1996, or any new WebKit port, which is completely open source. With WebGL, we see stances between the major contributors, fighting to set the standard or to get things their way… let’s see how it turns out.
lol, this is a great graphic. It just doesn’t show Google Chrome and is about 3 years old. 3 years is a long time in this world.
You can learn WebGL here: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217
Expect to hear more about WebGL. I read this morning about Facebook now making a major push towards HTML5, and with that, setting up teams to create 3D games using WebGL. WebGL, will make a major change in our web world. Facebook’s push towards HTML5 & WebGL
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