Tuesday, February 5, 2008

HTML 5 draft

I was going to go into more detail about my February 1st decision, but earlier today I took a look at the HTML 5.0 draft to see what was changing. In particular, I wanted to see what was happening with the Canvas tag. This is an extension to HTML for allowing 2D graphics manipulation right inside the HTML page without needs for plug-ins such as Flash or the M$ Flash Clone. Needless to say that while Firefox supported this tag since 1.5 (and current versions of Opera and Safari support it) the Monopoly browser does not. Having the canvas as part of the HTML 5 specifications should eventually fix this problem. Sure enough, version 5 has the canvas class but what got me really excited was the statement "Note: A future version of this specification will probably define a 3d context (probably based on the OpenGL ES API)."

Obviously it would be really nice to have 3D built into the browser using a simple canvas tag. As part of an open standard, with no plug-ins to worry about or expensive tools to buy this would be great for developing browser based games. The question is what do they mean by future version of this specification? I am hoping that they are referring to a later draft version of HTML 5 and that HTML 5 is finalized soon.

No comments: