Re: Some Questions About Erasers

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Fri, 24 Mar 1995 14:22:19 -0800 (PST)


On Fri, 24 Mar 1995, [ Davey ] wrote:
> I wrote to Mark to ask whether the current Lab browser supported
> stuff like server-side includes/parsing. This could go a long
> way towards making a user-selectable environment representation
> doable in VRML, as it stands. I put a user-selectable background
> pattern intot a web site I'm doing. Ubique is using user-selectable
> faces in their Internet chat software (see: http://ubique.com) -
> I think that this is a good avenue to pursue.

Well, Labyrinth as a browser obviously doesn't have server-side includes
- but if you're dishing content out with a server that can (like NCSA's)
then you could have server-side includes with your VRML document, but I
don't think that's what you meant.

What you're really talking about it the ability for the user to establish
their own overriding preferences upon the rendering or existance of
objects the browser fetches on the net. To a large extent this isn't a
language issue but rather a browser or VRML-tool issue - if you'd rather
have that model of the car be colored in purple rather than blue, then
it's up to the browser to know what parts of VRML to change. If you're
talking about a network navigator that represented connections as lines
between distinctly shaped and colored objects, you're talking about a
tool which creates that using VRML, and again there's nothing the
language has to do to allow that (other than be a useful modeling
language).

Brian

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