Yes. I thought your idea interesting because it is a reasonable
approach to the problems of helper apps in general. Video
and animation are treated like this in other interactive
document types. Nicol notes that some combination of
features is desirable. If text is part of a scene
(within the VRML), non-complex VRML constructs can
represent it, but if large texts are required, then objects
of the type you suggest will suffice. Represent it as
a magazine, newspaper, graffitti, etc. if the illusion is useful.
Overlays can be ugly, but that is implementation.
OTH, applications such as HTML are best called in their
own browsing environment. That breaks the "reality" part
of the "virtuality", but the illusion isn't always practical or useful.
Where other apps call VRML apps, they will probably take
this approach.
What seems best for the long run is cooperative apps. In other
projects where this subject is discussed, communication
layers with standardized message passing are proposed.
Agreements similar to those that resulted in the ODBC
for SQL-based relational systems or CORBA/DSOM are made.
The draft for the ISO WG8 model for SMSL (Standard Multimedia
Scripting Language) is oriented toward CORBA. This
is not a VRML-only issue, so the wisest course appears
to be one in which VRML acknowledges the cooperative
app concept, but specifies its own text object types
for text within scenes. That leaves the issues of
complexity of representation (attributes of the objects),
unification or separation of text and text rendering,
and the encoding debate. Text rendering is a big
challenge, so I vote for separation. Encoding must
be made *easy to spot* so a receiving system can
render or select the defaults. VRML browsers should
enable user-selection for defaults to speed up the
transactions. Sophisticated systems should then
allow the user to tweak the local world to taste as this
is a serious competitive issue for commercial applications
of VR just as it is for WWW pages.
Len Bullard
"Alexandria rises from the ash. Would that Hypatia could."