Bottom line on ActiveVRML

Mike McCue ([email protected])
Fri, 8 Dec 1995 03:15:20 -0800

Colin Campbell at Microsoft writes:
>ActiveVRML is a 4D representation, just like VRML is a 3D representation.
>...
>To put it another way, why not use Java or C to implement drawing
>commands and skip VRML altogether? The answer of course is that having
>a representation is a Good Thing

This is an *excellent*, bottom line summary of what ActiveVRML is all about. Even though
there is overlap with VRML in some areas, it is extremely unfortunate that MS chose to name
this otherwise well thought out proposal by attaching the VRML suffix. The name alone will
cause many misconceptions, not to mention flat out rejections due to the highly charged
political nature of the letters V-R-M-L.

Given that MS is saying that their proposal is meant to represent any collection of data
types over time, I suggest we consider ActiveVRML for what it really is: a time based
markup language for groups of static data types.

- mike

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