HTML 5 Starting to Make Waves: Enter WebGL

Flash and Silverlight, do you hear those footsteps?

Those are the footsteps of innovation and technology normalization. HTML5-based WebGL is coming and with it, a royalty-free, developer-friendly model that threatens to dethrone the plugin-dependent, high-fidelity web experience. But it doesn't stop there...we have to wonder where desktop applications will be left in the wake of cloud-based, HTML5-compliant, WebGL-powered applications.

The inclusion of the WebGL standard into Google Chrome's most recent stable build, version 9, is a pretty big statement. It certainly caught my attention tonight!

With WebGL + the Google Web Toolkit now in the fray, I think Microsoft should consider how they are positioning Silverlight - make it play nicely, or you might not be able to play at all. The same goes for Adobe and it's Flash platform that carries with it a notable reputation of bloat. On a side note, I find that bloat more often comes from developers misusing frameworks than frameworks misusing ones and zeros.

There are, of course, other sides to the argument that need to be considered. I expect yet another update from Bart on this very topic given the more recent news with Chrome + WebGL.

One thing that remains to be seen is how this impacts the mobile market - step aside, Flash+iPhone drama, there's a new soap opera and it centers around a company that knows how to play the game. That's why I've set up a Google Alert for Google+mobile+WebGL.

If you don't use Google Chrome, you should try it out. It's superbly fast, intelligently designed and a pleasure to browse with. If you do have Google Chrome installed, as of today you should be able to see these samples, which do not use Flash or Silverlight, just pure WebGL goodness:

http://code.google.com/p/webglsamples/

Here's a great example of WebGL in Google's labs called "Google Body":

http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/body.html

This is probably not the most appropriate "first blog" of a .NET enthusiast such as myself, but as Chrome was self-updating earlier this evening, I was inspired and felt I had to allow this excitement to bubble over into the ether.

I find myself continuously awe-struck by this ever-changing technosphere into which our generation was thrust. That's right, I just ended a sentence with the word "thrust".

Twice.