Charter
Stephan Diehl (diehl@cs.uni-sb.de)
Tue, 08 Apr 1997 12:23:53 +0200
I'd like to draw your attention on a central question
of this working group, namely its goal. From mails
of people involved in the development of VRML 2.0,
I got the impression, that there is an "unofficial"
agreement, that there will be no VRML 3.0 in the
near future (let's say the next 2 years). The leading
companies want to finish their implementations of VRML 2.0
browsers as soon as possible and then they want to
sell tools and servers. So instead of developing a
proposal of extensions to be intergrated into VRML 3.0,
we should (as I did for VRML++ and Sungwoo Park
is currently doing for OOVRML) develop a preprocessor
which generates VRML 2.0. So for all our extensions
it must be possible to convert them into VRML 2.0.
This is a serious restriction. But it has also many
advantages. The preprocessor can be combined with
every (?) VRML 2.0 browser, it's much easier to implement
then to change an existing VRML 2.0 browser, ...
C++ started as a set of C macros, but as it was widely
used, people wrote compilers which generated native code
directly from C++ programs. Thereafter C++ was extended
by features which could no longer be expressed by macros.
If our group is able to devise the right extensions,
we could hope for a similiar success story.
Cheers
-- Stephan
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Dr. Stephan Diehl Tel.: ++49-681/302-3915
EMAIL: diehl@cs.uni-sb.de WWW: http://www.rw.cdl.uni-saarland.de/private/diehl
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