Re: Results of the VRML Survey

Kevin Goldsmith (unitcirc@netcom.com)
Tue, 23 Aug 1994 14:18:07 -0700 (PDT)


> Another point, which is critical to linking VRML with scripts, is the
> ability to have an extendable data model for objects. The goal here is
> to allow for high level descriptions of objects to be defined in VRML.
> I want to be able to define an object, say "house" and to give it
> some parameters, say "4 bedrooms" and "double garage", that are not
> a priori part of the language. Declarative programming languages like
> Prolog and Lisp provide direct support for this kind of thing and VRML
> needs to do the same. The semantics are then defined by linking the
> VRML to scripts that recognise these tags. The common tags can be
> considered formally in the same way; its just that the "scripts" for
> these are considered to be built-in to every VRML 0.1 viewer.
>

I think programability might be beyond the scope of a markup
language. I was thinking more along the lines of adding scripting to
objects in a field of the object, rather than make all of VRML a
"programming" language. VRML, at its simplest definition, should be a
"scene-drescription" language. Maybe there should be something else that
could be a fuller "scripting-language" that was a superset of VRML.

Kevin