programming in webspace

Chris Holt ([email protected])
Thu, 9 Jun 1994 23:36:36 +0100 (BST)


Tony Parisi writes:
> Hi Chris. Glad to have you aboard. I agree with your half-way house
> assessment. Visual languages will be a few years in coming, though, so
> it's important that we put something together soon that uses a more
> traditional approach, i.e. graphical editors plus text-based languages for
> expressing behaviors. It is my hope that from the beginning we can design
> VRML so that there will be a smooth transition to those languages of the
> future. It will be up to people like yourself to help!
>
> [To Mark Pesce: Hey Mark, we might have our first requirement for the
> spec!]

The approach we're taking right now is to use Tcl to give us
a graphical editor, with which we can create executables. I
don't know if you've looked at the Tcl/tk stuff (I haven't
seen [incr Tcl] or whatever it's called). We've been kind of
mulling over embedding html links in things, but not done
anything.

One thing I think you should be clear about is that you can
have both 2D and 3D structures (and, of course, doors from one
to another); and that these can be both bounded and unbounded.
Thus, a page is a bounded plane, and a room is a bounded space.
Also, the links among these should themselves be representable
in "map spaces", so you can step outside to see where the
current space is linked to, and to add and delete links.

Cheers, Chris

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