3D on the Internet is about as old as 3D graphics acceleration itself. But all those ideas often disappeared quickly after their release, because they always required a special browser plug-in. Now there is a new idea to enable 3D web graphics that do not need a plug-in, but are enabled via JavaScript acceleration. Conceivably, this could hand Firefox and Chrome yet another advantage, while Microsoft will feel even more pressure to work on JavaScript acceleration for its Internet Explorer.

This new approach has been drafted by the Khronos group in a response to a proposal from Mozilla, which will chair the initiative to come up with an open, royalty-free standard for 3D graphics on the Web. The working group said that it is considering several ideas, including OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 to enable a 3D world within a browser window.

What differentiates this approach from previous 3D ideas is that there are no proprietary technologies involved. Instead, the 3D capabilities will be integrated in ECMAScript and run in a browser window without the need of a plug-in. ECMAScript is often confused with JavaScript and while it is not JavaScript, it is closely related: ECMAScript was approved as standard in 1997 and contains elements of both JavaScript and JScript (Microsoft’s JavaScript-compatible client-side scripting language.) JavaScript and Jscript are compatible with ECMAScript, but include features that are not supported by ECMAScript.

You can read the entire article at TG Daily.