Umm, the people at Microsoft are not exactly fake. Microsoft, for the
last year or two, has been buying up some of the best graphics people
in the world. For example, Jim Kajiya has about six SIGGRAPH papers,
and is the author of the Rendering Equation. And Conal and Salim are
no slouches either, in graphics. Whatever one might think of the
politics of a large software company putting out software as an "open"
standard (what does "open" mean? Everyone claims that their software
is "open"), we should all look at this Active VRML proposal. It's
been worked on, and worked over by some of the best minds in the
graphics business, and there will be a lot there to learn from.
I particular, I think that there are very good reasons why the
event-callback model starts to break down when we get to
highly-interactive graphics, and why we need to drastically rethink
how we program worlds, so that we can account for the unavoidable
complexities of distributed, reactive 3D worlds. Even if Microsoft's
proposal isn't going to solve _all_ of our future problems (for who
can anticipate them), it is a radical departure from the current
model, and we should try to understand why they have proposed
something so different.
So please, I think we should avoid spamming this list with
name-calling, and we should concentrate on the technical merits of the
proposals at hand.
Tom