I thought we didn't want to make the same mistakes as the web?
I'd be willing to bet that transferring those fancy bullets, buttons
and lines put a significant strain on many networks and servers. How
much faster would your Web browser be if you could just download those
buttons once and keep reusing them?
VRML worlds will be composed of more interchangeable parts than HTML.
Thus we should think hard about how we're going to distribute these
objects in the most efficient way possible.
For instance, say there are two sites using the exact same textures.
If I'm a smart client I'll keep a cache of textures on disk or in RAM.
If the client knew that the two textures are the same it would halve
the storage requirements for a local cache.
The problem is social and technical. You need to get
world-builders to agree to use a common naming scheme for their
objects. You need a way of distributing data to localized caches and
keeping track of it. You need a generalized method to access these
local caches.
-- | Paul Lindner | [email protected] | Slipping into madness | | Distributed Computing Services | is good for the sake | Gophermaster | University of Minnesota | of comparison. ///// / / / /////// / / / / / / / / //// / / / / / / / /