I don't know what spec you are looking at :-)
If you are saying that Sphere and Cone and Cylinder are curved shapes,
well, yeah, I guess you are sort of right. However, you can't do a whole
lot with these (sans boolean operations). But Michael clearly was
refering to NurbsSurface and NurbsCurve nodes. These have been touched on
previously. Inventor has them, but they were left out of 1.0 largely
because of the burden it puts on the browser to tesselate and render
them if I recall correctly.
Personally, I am all for including as much of Inventor into VRML 2.0 as
possible - WebSpace already reads all Inventor nodes in addition to the
VRML-specific nodes, and "extended" scenes are already prevalent. Inventor
has been around for more than 3 years now (?), has gone through several
major revisions/improvements, and there are even books out about it.
If the VRML spec is going to persist it has some catching up to do...
but we must keep it an open spec at all costs.
I suggest that for VRML 2.0 we adopt the latest, greatest version of Inventor
and concentrate on *extending* it by adding web-specific nodes and defining a
method or methods for interactions. After all, although VRML *uses*
geometry, it is not *about* geometry, IMO.