The W3C Community Group “Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture” met in a breakout session at this year’s TPAC conference in Lyon
The main goal was to present the overall strategy shift to provide even more use cases and applications on the existing “polyfill” layers (e.g. X3DOM and XML3D), instead of focusing on an overall declarative 3D specification upfront.
The main goal therefore is to harmonize and extent this so-called polyfill layer to provide all the features and technologies needed for an extended set of targeted use cases. This includes CSS-based material systems as well as a deep integration into the DOM event and monitoring mechanism. The proposed system architecture was well received and people encouraged the presenters and declarative 3D community group to work on hard requirements for the related W3C specification and UA vendors.
Another topic being discussed was the support for polyfill layers in general. Especially systems that provide new and novel DOM elements are not fully supported yet. The proposed web component are oriented to Web application developers, but layers that provide APIs and features, which are indistinguishable from native UA features are not yet adequately supported.