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- State of the Industry
- The X3D Initiative
- Letter from the Editor
- Alphabet Soup: Our glossary of technical acronyms
by N. Polys
Version 1.0
Application Programming Interface
DOM-
The Document Object Model which describes the structure and hierarchy of objects in a web page such as forms, images, links, etc. so they can be manipulated by the browser through scripting.
MPEG 4-
A patented binary data format and compression scheme that can be used to stream geometry, animations, and other multimedia.
Multi-Texturing-
The technique in 3D graphics that provides an explicit description of how multiple texture graphic files are transformed, combined and applied to geometry. This adds a great amount of realism to 3D scenes. These various textures fall under the headings of: light & shadow maps, diffuse texture maps, specular texture maps, and environment maps. In the case of X3D, this means a profile extension of additional nodes for hardware accelerated lighting and rendering.
NIST-
National Institute for Standards Technology
NURBS -
öNon-Uniform Rational B-Splines are a mathematical way to describe 3D geometry based on curves rather than polygons.
SAI -
Script Authoring Interface which is the new script API for X3D which is designed to unify scripting languages for 3D and DOM compatibility.
SMIL-
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language which can specify the time-sequencing of audio and video elements in a multimedia presentation as well as place them on the display and link them to other media objects. Real Networks utilizes this technology.
SVG -
Scalable Vector Graphics in a proposed XML application to describe and manipulate 2D shapes, images, and text on a web page.
XHTML -
The W3C's effort to refine HTML into strict XML. This tightening of the standard gives developers many more options to deliver valid, multi-tiered content.
XSL -
Extensible Style Language actually consists of 2 XML applications: document transformation and document formatting which allows authors to convert content between different documents and then render them to the reader.