Re: Some Questions About VRML

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Fri, 24 Mar 1995 10:02:48 -0800 (PST)

On Fri, 24 Mar 1995, Andrew C. Esh wrote:
> We need to stop thinking in terms of perfection in design, or technical
> "utopia". There is no such thing. Progress is a process. First we write
> lame little imagination ticklers like Doom, and then build on what we
> learn. We cannot allow ourselves to be hobbled by the idea that VR and 3D
> have to be perfectly designed, with all the loose ends discussed to death
> before we can write one line of code. Think, Design, Model, Build,
> Evaluate, and then go back to Thinking. If this cycle stops inside any
> phase, the system ceases to function, and progress halts. There is death
> in that.

But Wisdom has a role in the development of new technologies, Wisdom learned
from getting burnt when the design of a system precluded a set of
functionality which became more necessary as time progressed. Gavin's right,
this is truely a World Wide web, and even if we don't deal with issues like
character sets and encodings at such at this point in time, we should not do
anything that closes off a major set of functionality. For example,
declaring ISO-8859-1 Latin as the "official" character set of VRML would be
kind of silly. That said, I don't see anything that we've done so far that
would prevent VRML from being used in non-English countries.

Brian

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