Apple’s WebKit team on Tuesday proposed a new Community Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to discuss the development of a new standard API that would offer improved 3D web graphics.
Apple’s WebKit team today proposed a new Community Group at the W3C to discuss the future of 3D graphics on the Web, and to develop a standard API that exposes modern GPU features including low-level graphics and general purpose computation. W3C Community Groups allow all to freely participate, and we invite browser engineers, GPU hardware vendors, software developers and the Web community to join us.
To kick off the discussion, we’re sharing an API proposal, and a prototype of that API for the WebKit Open Source project. We hope this is a useful starting point, and look forward to seeing the API evolve as discussions proceed in the Community Group.
Web Graphics Proposal ‘Metal on the Web’
The WebGPU standard Apple is proposing is “much more object-oriented than the current WebGL standard. The new proposed standard is being called “Metal on the web” by some developers.
Apple says while a new open web graphics standard must be compatible with platform-specific technologies, it must also be easy to adopt, exposing the general-purpose computational functionality of modern GPUs, and must work well with emerging standards like WebAssembly and WebVR.
The standard will be open to all W3C Community Groups, GPU hardware vendors, software developers, and the Web community as a whole.
For the technically inclined among us, more information and details on the Apple WebGPU proposal can be found on the Cupertino firm’s WebKit blog.
