Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamwong246 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, because of flashy 3d graphics! If you can't see the potential, you are just being obtuse.

There's potential, sure, but at the same time, animations like this don't come cheap - it takes a lot of knowledge, time, effort, and artistic insight to build something like that, which is a rare combination in any one person. But mostly time, and time equals money, and money is something a lot of people-facing companies aren't willing to pay for visuals like these.

Even if the could, that is. I can see gaming companies investing in visuals like this to enhance their game's web pages, or even delegate parts of the game's UI to a browser. Battlefield 3 (and probably 4) does this for its server browser, removing the need for a large chunk of UI from its game, and removing the need to update the whole game in a patch if they want to make changes to their server browser. No fancy 3D effects or animations in there though. At least, not yet. iirc, they've outsourced development of that server browser to a third party.

Seconding Miyamoto's question. Is there a use case for mixing 3D graphics and HTML, as opposed to showing 3D graphics in a box on the page? I don't count "making fancy website intros" as a very important use case, because everyone hated such intros the last time around.

Definitely! This is really just a demo, so I can see how people are complaining that it "doesn't really do anything." But that shows such a startling lack of vision and imagination. We are supposed to see the potential in new tech and then push it further. Or at least, that's how I see myself. Cranks and nay-sayers have no business in this industry, in my not-so-humble opinion.

HTML was originally a document, but today we've stretched it to do so much. And that's great! There's no need to draw a line around fancy webgl stuff. Your whole page can twist and flow and sparkle and whatever. You can make styling prettier sure but also make you content deeper. It will take time work out the kinks but hey, it's an adventure! That's pretty cool! Boring is never good. And there will be those with poor taste no matter the medium. This isn't a fad and it isn't superficial. This can totally change our experience on the web. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of such cool stuff?

Can't tell if satire or sincere. Maybe that was your intention though.

Do please educate us on its potential, if it's so obvious.

Games perhaps?

To inspire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com