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WebGL draft spec brings 3D interweb future one step closer

Beer goggles at the ready, fun times ahead!

The Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera-backed WebGL project took a significant step forward yesterday, after the Khronos group pushed out a public draft specification of the WebKit-derived code.

Publication of the rough-round-the-edges specification means more web developers can now tinker with, and enhance, the code. Of course that doesn't mean WebGL has been finalised as a standard yet.

"Participation from the web community is essential towards finalising the specification, which we hope to do in the first quarter of 2010," noted Mozilla's Arun Ranganathan in a blog post on Thursday.

Brave souls interested in playing with the draft code will need an OpenGL 2.0-capable GPU and drivers to cope with the hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in WebGL.

"The release of the draft specification is one step in bringing about a plugin free 3D API to the web, usable straight out of the box," said Ranganathan.

Google also waded into the 3D-web-code-free-for-all.

"We're happy to announce that Chromium contains provisional WebGL support on Linux (32- and 64-bit), Mac and Windows. This implementation was developed in close collaboration with Apple Computer and utilises much shared code from WebKit," it said.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer is the only browser that remains outside of the WebGL love-in, that Mozilla has developed with support from Khronos Group, which watches over the OpenGL graphics interface.

The draft WebGL spec can be downloaded here. ®

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