December 15, 2009, 7:48 am
The Khronos Group has announced the availability of the first public WebGL specification draft. The document describes a new emerging Web standard that will make it possible for developers to natively integrate rich 3D graphics in conventional Web content. The Khronos Group, which is best known for its role as the maintainer of the OpenGL standard, hopes that publishing the WebGL draft will help attract third-party involvement in refining the standard.
Khronos and Mozilla began collaborating on WebGL earlier this year. The technology proved compelling and has attracted the interest of other browser vendors including Apple, Opera, and Google. Mozilla’s own WebGL implementation has already been integrated into Firefox and was made available in nightly builds back in September. Apple’s WebKit rendering engine also gained WebGL support at roughly the same time. The availability of multiple interoperable implementations before the publication of the actual standard is a clear sign that the browser vendors are enthusiastic about WebGL’s potential and are eager to get it into the hands of users and developers.
