X2D Specifications

This document outlines the specifications for X2D: a dynamic, interactive graphics file format using XML. Some of the functionality of X2D includes scalable vector graphics as well as 3D scene graphs. 

Contents

1 Basics
2 Document Structure
3 Rendering Model
4 Objects, Components, and Containers
5 Shapes
6 Text
7 Images
8 3D Graphics (updated 11/9)
    8.1 X3D
    8.2 Nodes
10 Interactivity
11 Actions
12 Animation
13 Scripting
14 Specifying Display Attributes
15 Miscellaneous

These specifications draw from the work of many sources, namely:

The motivation behind this document is to create a standard file format for viewing and interacting with documents on different platforms. While HTML is currently the most widely used browser format, its graphics capabilities are not as developed as the SVG format, hence the reason for choosing the latter.

While there are already several committees working on scalable vector graphics formats, there is not one standard which can readily be used; the W3C's specifications are still in development while the Flash file format is binary encoded and assumes workstation affordances (such as a mouse for input).

In the nature of the Interactive Workspaces project, we hope to address issues of device affordances (such as input and output technology) as well as cross-platform playabillity (by this I mean different display spaces, not operating systems) in developing these set of specifications. These are areas especially unexplored in other markup languages.