RE: 3D -- WebGL and SVG?

On 03/08/2011, at 9:24 AM, I wrote:

 

 How else might we conceptualize markup for 3D? Is this something worth
thinking about here? [SVG WG]

 

And on  Friday, August 05, 2011 8:17 PM Dean Jackson replied:

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It depends what you mean by "thinking about". I personally don't feel that
the SVG WG is the right place for discussions on 3d. I also think that
markup languages are extremely difficult to get right (considering there is
only one truly successful markup language at the moment), and that 3d has
such broad use cases that at best you'd be targeting a small subset of the
community. Speaking of community, the W3C has very little involvement from
there - I can't see how it would manage anything better than X3D or Collada,
both of which were designed by domain experts over a long period.

 

The only thing that's in the domain of SVG is making sure that it can be
used with 3d technology. I don't think there is much to do there, but I
might be wrong.

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Hi Dean,

 

3D, per se, may be even lie beyond SVG’s charter. But 2.5D isn’t and several
activities and proposals that address 3D-ish effects have come forward
within the SVG WG.

 

It strikes me, from a very naïve perspective, that X3D is much lower level
in the 3D realm than SVG is in the 2D realm and that Collada is more of a
higher level glue meant to hold other chunks together. They are both XML
vocabularies, but they are not quite what I’d call declarative languages, in
the same way that HTML, SVG and SMIL are.

 

The incubator group I mentioned can be seen at
http://www.x3dom.org/x3dom/w3c/charter/ and targets, as a collaboration with
the SVG WG:

 

“The XG coordinates closely with the SVG WG on common features and concepts
of 2D and 3D graphics.”

 

So, maybe, as you say, the domain of SVG is limited to making sure it can be
used with 3D technology, but it is possible that the similarities, and
markup *could* share a lot more in common. SVG has done a lot of things very
very well. It is conceivable that slight extensions to the conceptual space
outlined by SVG + SMIL + replicate could motivate just the sort of
declarative language that the incubator group seems to be seeking. After
all, most of the mathematics of higher dimensional space is written in
notation that appears in 2D <humor />.

 

On a tangential note, irrelevant to the basic discussion, if by the one
truly successful markup language you mean HTML, I think its success was less
due to its careful crafting than to the remarkable void that existed pulling
*any* suitable declarative language into that hungry space at the time.  

 

Cheers

David