[sldev] Re: [VIEWER] SVG on a prim
Argent Stonecutter
secret.argent at gmail.com
Mon Sep 10 11:58:01 PDT 2007
From: Lynne Wu
> Why is [HTML] too expensive to render? Cycles? Resources? Is
> http://www.ubrowser.com not a realistic interpretation of this
> idea? Thanks
First, HTML is intrinsically difficult to render, because HTML
documents are laid out dynamically. Rendering a page of HTML is
comparable to typesetting a page for printing. It's only been about a
decade that computers capable of doing that kind of layout in real
time have been cheap enough for "everyone".
Second, the gecko engine is a relatively heavyweight one.
Third, HTML as a texture on a prim means that you have to be prepared
for a situation where there are hundreds of HTML textures being
updated concurrently within draw distance. Just about any mall will
have an environment like that. That means hundreds of instances of
the gecko rendering engine running *in addition to* everything else
SL is doing.
What this means is that HTML on a prim will need to be limited to at
most a few surfaces visible to any given avatar. As an extension of
the media-texture model HTML is fine. As a way to render arbitrary
text on an arbitrary prim, a method that does static fixed layout is
far preferred.
PS: I even *less* want to see XUL in SL.
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