

WebGL Spec Initial Public Draft Released - sahaj
http://blog.chromium.org/2009/12/webgl-spec-initial-public-draft.html

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ghempton
I'm running the developer version of chrome and none of the demos work?

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jra101
You have to add --enable-webgl -no-sandbox to your chrome.exe shortcut.

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trezor
I admit just skimming this, but what benefits does WebGL add to (the very much
failed) VRML?

Embedding in HTML pages? More JS hooks? Anything which couldn't have been
bolted onto VRML? Or is VRML just too dated to be a reasonable thing to build
on? Or am I comparing apples to oranges?

Not trying to be overly critical, but I get the feeling someone somewhere is
reinventing a wheel.

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samlittlewood
In some ways WebGL is much less than VRML - WebGL is a set javascript bindings
for OpenGL ES2.0. The great thing about OpenGL is that there has been
considerable effort over teh years to only introduce concepts that have been
found necessary for communicating with graphics hardware. Further, the ES2.0
subset removes a lot of historical cruft. The result is tha the API is pretty
much concerted with shipping textures and data streams for the GPU, and
managing the shaders to operate on them.

VRML brings a scene graph API, file formats, materials - and does not let you
at the GPU. You wind up having to shoehorn your design into this fantasy view
of how 3D graphics programs should be written. As soon as you stray away from
the very limited design, you wind up implementing your own system, exporting
it into the VRML data structures, ony for it to then extract it back out for
stuffing into the GPU.

Having myself inflicted 3D scenegraph API's on other programmers, and felt at
first hand the pain and horror, I would never endorse that as the lowest level
of access to the graphics hardware.

