[Rd] rgl/webGL complains about Javascript, even in recent online docs?

Dominick Samperi djsamperi at gmail.com
Sun Sep 13 00:12:38 CEST 2015


FYI, one platform where I have not been able to get interactive rgl
working is iOS 8.
iOS 8 is supposed to support WebGL, and Javascript is enabled.

On Sat, Sep 12, 2015 at 4:33 PM, Dominick Samperi <djsamperi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the pointers and the quick fix.
>
> Perhaps the generated HTML code should issue a
> message like "Javascript load problem" instead of
> "You must enable Javascript to view this page properly,"
> because the latter can be misleading.
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 12, 2015 at 12:42 PM, Duncan Murdoch
> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 12/09/2015 7:37 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>> On 11/09/2015 10:14 PM, Dominick Samperi wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> The recently created online "rgl Overview" at
>>>> https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rgl/vignettes/rgl.html
>>>> illustrates a problem that I am trying to resolve.
>>>>
>>>> At the bottom of each image block on that page appears the
>>>> advisory: You must enable Javascript to view this page properly.
>>>>
>>>> I am using Safari under MacOS with Javascript and WebGL
>>>> both enabled, so it must be the detection algorithm that is
>>>> mistaken. It is not clear to me how this works after looking
>>>> over the generated HTML code (generated by knit2html
>>>> in my case).
>>>>
>>>> I found this after I ran into this problem in a different context,
>>>> namely, in the process of creating a wordpress page that
>>>> contains interactive rgl content. I tried simply placing
>>>> the code generated by knit2html into a wordpress page,
>>>> but the result is not interactive and that message about
>>>> Javascript not being enabled appears.
>>>>
>>>> On the other hand, if I open the generated code in a
>>>> browser directly, interaction works and there is no
>>>> Javascript message.
>>>>
>>>> In summary, interactive rgl code works stand-alone, but
>>>> not in wordpress, and not in the "rgl Overview" page.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I see the same in Firefox, it's not just Safari.
>>>
>>> If I look at the browser console, I see errors indicating that rglClass
>>> is not defined, and I don't see a block of Javascript code that should
>>> have been inserted.
>>>
>>> If I install rgl from the source on CRAN, I see the same problem, so it
>>> looks like an rgl bug.  I'll see if I can fix it.
>>
>> Yes, it was an rgl bug.  During my testing I always had knitr loaded
>> before rgl, but when building the vignettes for the package, the load
>> order is different, and the initialization was silently skipped.
>>
>> I'll soon be committing changes to R-forge to fix this, and eventually
>> it will end up on CRAN.  At the moment it looks like I need to add this
>> function:
>>
>> setupKnitr <- function() {
>>   if (requireNamespace("knitr")) {
>>     knitr::knit_hooks$set(webgl = hook_webgl)
>>     knitr::knit_hooks$set(rgl = hook_rgl)
>>     environment(hook_webgl)$commonParts <- TRUE
>>     environment(hook_webgl)$reuse <- TRUE
>>   }
>> }
>>
>> and that should be called (just once) near the start of the vignette.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>



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