Re: request agenda time to present X3D summary at HTML5 TPAC meeting

On Oct 30, 2009, at 19:40, Shelley Powers wrote:

> Being able to use X3D in an HTML serialization, based on the
> _precedent_ set by inclusion of SVG and MathML would be a very
> interesting discussion item.

I don't see SVG and MathML setting a precedent for X3D.

When support for SVG and MathML was added to the HTML5 parsing  
algorithm, rendering SVG DOMs was already supported by 3 out of the  
top 4 browser engines and the fourth also had support for retained- 
mode markup-based 2D graphics (VML). So at that point in time, there  
was vendor consensus by implementation behavior showing that retained- 
mode markup-based 2D graphics were worth implementing and enabling SVG  
parsing in text/html was the shortest path of enabling retained-mode  
markup-based 2D graphics in text/html in the largest number of browser  
engines *given* what was already implemented.

Likewise, given what was already implemented in Gecko and Opera for  
MathML DOMs, adding support for MathML in the text/html parser was the  
shortest path of adding inline math support to text/html.  
(Furthermore, there's a stronger case for why math should be inline  
than why either 2D or 3D graphics should be inline.)

In the case of X3D, there's no pre-existing native support in any of  
the top 4 browser engines, so even if there were consensus that HTML  
should support inline markup-based retained-mode 3D graphics, it  
wouldn't follow that X3D being the format would be the shortest path  
to having the concept implemented.

(This email shouldn't be read to be for or against X3D. I'm just  
pointing out that SVG and MathML don't set an applicable precedent  
here.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 2 November 2009 13:30:31 UTC