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
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.
