The final release of the WebGL 1.0 specification has been announced by the Khronos organisation backing the format.
WebGL is a browser format for enabling a standard format of 3D graphics in web browsers. It is supported by the OpenGL standard under the hood. It’s not as if this standard is years away from hitting a browser on your desktop though – Firefox 4, Chrome 9+, a special preview of Opera and the Safari nightly builds all support this specification already. In fact, that’s every major browser vendor except Microsoft.
WebGL enables direct access to OpenGL graphics directly in JavaScript, giving web developers the opportunity to come up with even more innovative ways of delivering interactive content online. To help out, there are already many libraries in place to accelerate developers from concept to release.
Khronos have also released a “comprehensive” WebGL test suite for free along with the standard, that should help browser manufacturers who are looking to adopt the standard ensure that they are compliant and that everything works the same across browsers – something that HTML has struggled with for some time.
“We believe WebGL will fundamentally change the Web experience” writes president of the Khronos Group and VP of Mobile Content at NVIDIA, Neil Trevett. “Khronos is committed to working with the Web community to ensure WebGL is a dynamic and enabling piece of the Web HTML5 ecosystem for both desktop and mobile platforms.”
You can get the spec, along with links to compatible browsers and libraries, from the Khronos site.
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