Open Standards for Real-Time 3D Communication

Hi

I've been trying to keep up with whats going on here at web3d.org as well as www.w3.org, and I like what I see. Great ideas are coming together to be included in great standards, and the X3D XML encoding could open many doors and possibilities for new content. But I don't think many people here have kept up with www.w3.org, because X3D doesn't mention anything about namespaces, except for in the schema. XML is not just about the tags people, its about the structure, the document model, its about interoperability. You can't have two sets of tags in the same document without XML Namespaces! and the only reason XML Namespaces work is if they are standardized. So if i make my X3D browser namespace aware, and use xmlns:x3d="http://www.web3d.org/x3d" as the namespace in my content, but someone else uses xmlns:x3d="http://www.web3d.org/specifications/x3d-namespace" in their content then neither browser can understand the other's content, and this is NOT interoperable! ALL I ASK FOR IS A URL! (or to be technical a URI). This would allow X3D to be used with XML Namespaces, which would allow you to incorporate XML content inside a world or even a world inside a web page or an SVG document, or as a RDF Metadata node definition, etc. The possibilities are endless, and we don't want to be poluting the global XML namespace with one format's tags. There are going to be other formats, and other ways of using those formats. The future is comming, are you ready to standardize it?

Andrew Robbins

I'm running into a similar problem on the WHATWG mailing list. I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate 3D into a web page without using proprietary plug-ins. Right how we're looking into a "3d" context for the proposed <canvas> element, but I'd much prefer an X3D solution that uses the W3C compound document formats. Unfortunately, without a namespace and a specification of how X3D would be used in a compound document format, I don't think this will become a reality any time soon.

Here's my idea of what an XHTML+X3D page should look like:

Excuse my ignorance, but isn't it possible to declare

<x3d:X3D profile='Immersive'
xmlns:x3d=http://www.web3d.org/specifications/x3d-3.0.xsd">
...
</x3d:X3D>

Yeah, already figured that out. Just failed to post a followup here. So I'm guessing an XHTML+X3D compound document would look like this:

When I was first researching this, there were no discussions about using an XML namespace for X3D, and now there are many discussions, but still no standardization. It seems as though different parts of Web3D, or members of discussions that take place on their mailing lists, have independently decided upon the following namespaces:

While all of these are steps in the right direction, the fact that Web3D cannot agree on a single namespace is bad news for interoperability. The only way for a new namespace-aware tool to work with content created using this unknown namespace model is by accepting a glob-URI such as:

This is unacceptable. There needs to be an XML namespace URI in the standard, or the goal that X3D is trying to reach will not be achieved.

Pleae have a look at:

http://www.web3d.org/x3d/wiki/index.php/X3D_and_HTML5

for the nearly current X3DOM proposal Basics

We ought to have the Web3D Symposium Behr paper up soon.

Thanks and Best Regards,
Joe