Fusion360 STEP file export with useful metadata? [Feature Request]

[starlight_ai]

Been using AutoDesk Fusion 360 for several months, and getting serious about STEP file management of various parts form factors my manufacturing company is creating. As a newbie, AutoDesk keeps putting up limitations that I swear thousands of users should have confronted already yet no responses arrive, even as my group has to DIY our own solutions. Today, we ask about STEP files.

1. STEP files are the modern export format for 3D parts information, and their standard allows parts to be represented exactly: e.g. a circular surface is defined as a circle of a specific radius and axis, part compositions know precise specific edges are shared across surfaces, and so on; the contrast to this is STL files which are ah-hoc triangular meshes which lose all absolute information, such that, e.g. a circle is simply a collection of triangular meshes which a human eye would identify as a circle but that information is lost.

2. STEP files can assign metadata to the part and its components, i.e., to surfaces, edges., etc., if my reading of the STEP AP203 Edition 2 standard is correct. This means that "that surface" can be labeled as "cup bottom" or "that edge" can be described as "knife cutting edge" and so on. This is insanely useful for contextual understanding of STEP files broadly, including by human sharing, LLM/AI interpretation without rendering STEP geometries, and basic post-manufacturing processing. 

Example: I build a push pin in Fusion 360. I want to label the top surface as "top surface" so that my Python program can identify the top surface by its indicator name, and apply whatever post-processing or analysis or post-manufacturing parts assembly to that specific surface. To my knowledge Fusion 360 provides no mechanism for applying metadata to specific surfaces and edges for exportation into STEP files, despite the clear capacity to do so. Is this correct? The alternative is insanely brittle business logic: the Python function must know how to identify "the top most plane which is circular in shape" which is both insanely challenging when parts become complicated but breaks the whole purpose of separating form factor engineering and its downstream processing (i.e., my Python function should not need to know the particulars of what my Fusion Engineer did). For this reason: I presume I am wrong in my understanding of this Fusion 360 limitation?

3. STEP files cannot be easily opened, edited, and annotated on business machines? This one surprises me. All of my search engine queries say the same thing: "To edit or annotate a STEP file, download FreeCAD." But this cannot be true? A rudimentary rendering of STEP files, with clickable interface to select surfaces and edges to add metadata should surely exist (there should be dozens of upstarts who coded their own versions on GitHub etc?) and this, if existing, would be a reasonable post-export phase that could annotate specific STEP files. This would relieve Fusion360 from needing to offer this. But this seems to not exist?

Worse still: the only forums I find (of which there are only a few) point to an ancient NIST "STEP File Analyzer and Viewer" which is only available for Microsoft Windows? Please tell me the industry did not back itself into a Microsoft matrix for manufacturing itself. Where are the versions for Linux, MacOS, and open source? Where are the versions running on a cloud server somewhere in JavaScript and HTML? I am very confused.

4. STEP files cannot be easily visualized in HTML JavaScript? Is this true? STL files are supported by the very broad-base THREE.js package, but searching online for STEP files lands on one or two random sandbox demos which more or less break. I had started this morning expecting this to be a five minute search which lands on the set of five industry standard options for dropping a JavasScript package into my HTML code?

Can someone help me understand the disconnect in the searching and the manufacturing industry?

Can people provide examples of what they use in the comments, please?

For now, I am using STL files in HTML with THREE.js, and manually injecting metadata using Python code.