After the demise of Adobe Flash and other web technologies that were used to render 3D browser animations, there hasn't been a single and dominant protocol to this effect. The Unity engine and WebGL are currently the most popular because they play nice with HTML5, but there are development efforts at play to come up with a more definitive standard.
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A recent document posted on the GitHub project of the WebKit rendering engine, which powers all Apple Safari Browsers as well as Opera and a few others, proposes the future inclusion of a media Element that wil replace the cumbersome canvas element. In theory, this element will work in a way that is similar to the video embedding element, which means that there will be server calls, but not in a streaming fashion.
The Model, which can be styled via CSS scripting, could either be a YouTube, Vimeo, or Google Maps video or an image (such as a QR code) displayed on a Google Map. When using an image, a caption is appended to the model so that it is displayed along with the image or 3D model.
The idea is for browsers to allow visitors to manipulate 3D models without messing up the scroll bars or the zoom level of the page itself. This is the gist of the proposal, which is mindful that this can be currently done to a certain extent with WebGL, although developers have to come up with their own set of manipulation widgets. A new model standard would not have to rely on JavaScript libraries because it would call up browser resources.
If the element is implemented, it is unclear how it would affect HTML 5 videos and 3D content within those, but the idea of using video could pave the way for more video-rich sites that rely on a lot of interactivity.
There is no question that developers and contributors to the Chromium project, which include Google and Microsoft, are working on similar proposals. We could say the same about Mozilla. The web is turning into a highly interactive internet component, and developers need the right coding standards to work with. For more information click here https://github.com/WebKit/explainers/tree/main/model.
