Re: somewhat tangential...look what exists for declarative 2D

Hi Sandy,

very impressing library with nice results. I'm sure it could be adapted 
to 3D.

I would like to take this opportunity to discuss about "Declarative 3D" 
use cases:

The nice design of libraries like these (with similar concepts in other 
like jQuery and Prototypes) leverages some nice features of JavaScript 
(functional, closures etc). This makes it easy (and fun) to develop on a 
higher abstraction layer.

But this also shows, that we should be careful, to not focus too much on 
the easiness of use when we argue for a declarative 3D approach. Let me 
give an example:

If you consider use case UC101[1]. Excluding the fact that the geometry 
should be posted to a blog, it means to create a Box with a certain 
color on a canvas with a certain size. Using a nice WebGL library and a 
canvas, this could be expressed like this:

nondec3d.select("myCanvas").appendBox(1, 1, 1)
      .diffuseColor(rgba(58,52,45,1));

Adding "onmouseover" and "onclick" would be just as easy.

You know that I'm committed to a declarative approach, but the example 
shows three things:

1. We should not focus on easiness for trivial examples, because it's 
not necessarily easier than API+Library. I think that reverses on more 
complex scenes, as the handling of objects not in a uniform structure 
(DOM) will be harder to handle.

2. The essentail point of use case UC101 is the ability to post 3D to a 
blog (the blog provider will not allow you to include arbitrary JS 
libraries)

3. These powerful functionality given, we don't have to solve everything 
in the declarative part. We should provide the building blocks and 
delegate everything else to libraries. This keeps the format lean and 
the chance higher to get it implemented natively one day.

I know that point 2 and 3 are a little contradictory on first sight. But 
the functionality in a foreign non-JS environment could be reduced 
compared to a full JS environment. This is just the same for HTML.

What do you think?

Best,
   Kristian

[1] 
http://www.w3.org/community/declarative3d/wiki/Use_Cases_and_Requirements#Use_Case_Description_UCD1:_MathBlog

Am 23.09.2011 19:53, schrieb Sandy Ressler:
> Hi folks, in our quest to develop use cases for 3D I would suggest
> looking at what has happened in the 2D world.
> SVG and a few other aspects of HTML5 currently provide declarative 2D.
> One amazing example of what people have done with this is a library
> called d3.js (from Mike Bostock)
> go to:
> http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ to see the overall set of examples and go to:
> http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20110921/#0 to see an amazing slide
> show (in this slide show you have to hit the right arrow key to advance
> the slide...and you can interact with most of the slides ...it's not
> obvious)
>
> Personally I think we should strive to be able to create web
> visualizations like this but using declarative 3D...someday ;-)
> Sandy
>
> Sandy Ressler
> High Performance Computing and Visualization Group
> National Institute of Standards and Technology
> 100 Bureau Drive, STOP 8911
> Gaithersburg MD, 20899
> (301) 975-3549 Fax: (301) 975-3218
> sressler@nist.gov <mailto:sressler@nist.gov>
>


-- 
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Kristian Sons
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, DFKI
Agenten und Simulierte Realität
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66123 Saarbrücken, Germany

Phone: +49 681 85775-3833
Phone: +49 681 302-3833
Fax:   +49 681 85775–2235
kristian.sons@dfki.de
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Received on Tuesday, 27 September 2011 16:13:55 UTC