Safari gets WebGL in WebKit Nightlies

October 20
2009
in HTML5 & Ajax

Well, those folks on webkit dev team sure are mov­ing fast. WebGL (OpenGL for web, i.e. fancy 3d graph­ics in your browser) spec hasn’t even been fin­ished yet, as far as I know, and they already have the stuff work­ing in the lat­est webkit builds. The good news about this is of course that as WebGL becomes more widely adopted, we’re going to see some inter­est­ing uses of 3D graph­ics for inter­faces on the web. Of course the flip­side of that is there’s a good chance that sud­denly dozens of sites will spring up with cheesy cubes or spheres rotat­ing with blink­ing colours or something.

Hopefully most uses of WebGL will be more sophisticated than that

Hopefully most uses of WebGL will be more sophis­ti­cated than that

WebGL itself is actu­ally pretty hard­core in com­par­i­son to stuff like HTML and JavaScript. It’s a true, honest-to-god pro­gram­ming lan­guage. Which means that even sim­ple things take a sub­stan­tial amount of code. Heck, even ini­tial­iz­ing the damn thing takes a whole func­tion. On the other hand, it’s also a very well estab­lished API (more specif­i­cally the OpenGL ES 2.0 API on which WebGL is based on) with plenty of resources, tuto­ri­als and web­sites that cover it from A to Z. So if you’re will­ing to roll up your sleeves and dig into it you’ll be mak­ing spin­ning cubes with blink­ing colours in no time.

For all the details and some exam­ple check out the WebKit blog.

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HTML5 Video and Audio Experiment

August 6
2009
in HTML5 & Ajax

Gizmodo had a post on an HTML5 exper­i­men­tal page from 9Elements design stu­dio. If you have Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 or lat­est Chrome build you can check it out your­self here.

It’s really an amaz­ing piece of work — beau­ti­ful ani­ma­tions cou­pled with sound and neat inter­ac­tiv­ity (click­ing the lights dis­plays tweets about the page). All this is done with no Flash, or Silverlight or any­thing like that, though of course the code that runs all that isn’t exactly triv­ial, it’s all HTML5, JavaScript and Canvas.

I hope that we see more and more peo­ple tak­ing advan­tage of HTML5. Internet Explorer cur­rently sup­ports only a small sub­set of HTML5 spec and none of it is for some­thing like this. But if there’s enough push for HTML5, hope­fully either the other browsers will leave IE com­pletely in the dust and peo­ple will just stop using it (one can always dream), or Microsoft will wiseup and imple­ment proper stan­dards and HTML5 sup­port into IE.

[Gizmodo Post]

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