Actually, I think the *far* greater tragedy would be for VRML to
end up like the HTML world, where the official spec is nearly
useless in writing a browser, and only moderately useful in
preparing content.
This is not the fault of the spec, but rather reflects the lack of
good HTML authoring tools. Most HTML is still composed by hand and
"validated" by seeing how it looks in the currently most popular
browser (which has historically been very permissive). The result
is that the existing body of HTML is essentially unspec-able.
Daeron's validator is a good start at heading off this disaster for
VRML, and I hope authors will use it religiously. But it would be
*much* better if VRML browsers had a "valiation" option built in, or
even better, flagged all erroneous VRML files. The VRML community
still has a chance to learn from the expensive mistakes of HTML --
don't throw away that chance!
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Paul Burchard <[email protected]>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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