Re: [Public WebGL] Proposed change to WebGL Event definition

[Chris Marrin <cmarrin@apple.com>]

On Oct 19, 2010, at 10:22 AM, Kenneth Russell wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 6:57 AM, Chris Marrin <cmarrin@apple.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Sep 3, 2010, at 10:08 PM, Cedric Vivier wrote:
>> 
>> On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 09:40, Kenneth Russell <kbr@google.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Chris Marrin <cmarrin@apple.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I've revised the event section (5.14). Please review.
>>> 
>>> Sorry for not realizing this before, but the "NOT_AVAILABLE" status
>>> code seems pretty useless, because if the web browser is so old that
>>> it doesn't support WebGL, then it definitely won't support delivery of
>>> the webglcontextcreationerror event.
>> 
>> 
>> NOT_AVAILABLE "WebGL is not implemented or not enabled in this browser"
>> I think the current meaning is confusing  (and indeed useless).
>> IIRC the original planned intent for this status code, meaning should be
>> something like :
>> "WebGL is currently disabled or temporarily unavailable because of high
>> resource usage by other tabs/programs."
>> 
>> I think that's another status code. Perhaps reasons for failure are:
>> - WebGL is not implemented (the event will never fire)
>> - WebGL is disabled by the browser
>> - WebGL is disabled by request of the user
>> - Hardware is insufficient for running WebGL content
>> - System is unable to run WebGL content because of other system constraints.
>> Maybe it is a bad idea to have status codes. There could be many more
>> reasons for not being able to use WebGL content. So maybe we should do as
>> Ken suggests and only have a status message. That way the user agent can put
>> any necessary recommendations into the string. The browsers would have L11N
>> issues, but that is probably manageable.
>> The unfortunate thing is that, if you don't have WebGL support at all, this
>> event will never fire. You will simply get a null return from getContext().
>> You' have to set up a timer and if it fires without any event being
>> generated you know you don't have WebGL. That's a hack.
>> I think the right way to handle that is to add a media query for WebGL.
>> We've made a proposal to add media queries for CSS animations, transitions,
>> and transforms. These are all supported in WebKit today. It would be easy to
>> add one for 'webgl'. You can run the query from JS and know you don't have
>> WebGL without having to call getContext(). But the really nice thing about
>> media queries is that you can use them in CSS style sheets. If WebGL is
>> missing you can style the page differently for, for instance, not take up
>> the space for the WebGL canvas.
>> So the proposal is to get rid of statusCode and add a media query for
>> 'webgl'. I will talk to dino, who is pushing the media query extensions
>> spec, about this as well.
> 
> Resurrecting this thread. I would like to remove the status codes from
> WebGLContextEvent for the reasons I cited earlier. Are there any
> objections to my doing so?

None from me

-----
~Chris
cmarrin@apple.com




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