Hi Len,

I agree with you for the most part but am curious about one point:

At 01:44 PM 2/12/99 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>o  XML - this part isn't hard.  3D tags will look just 
>like HTML tags will look just like 2D tags, etc.  It is just  
>a file format.  This may help the "geekSpeak" problem 
>of VRML.  In other words, same scripting, same interfaces, 
>same syntax; what you learn for one applies to the others, 
>so the surface area of the learning comes down.

Is that "surface area" very large, though?  What I mean to say is, do you
think the major problem that people have with VRML is the syntax?  I would
argue the opposite, that the problem with authoring VRML is not its syntax,
but rather general 3D concepts like transformations, texture coordinates,
and so forth.  Casting VRML to XML will indeed be A Good Thing but I think
its benefits are largely syntactical and not semantic.

Certainly "appearance Appearance { material Material { ... } }" is ugly as
heck and should be immediately killed, but I doubt this is the biggest
stumbling block for beginners. :)

By the way, I completely agree with Alan's comments.  We did VRML
production for more than three years and we were lucky not to have to worry
about cross-platform compatibility, since we generally authored for one
browser only.  That was bad enough.  Once, we did a cross-browser project
and I lost a lot of hair as a result. :)

Take care,
  -John

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