To quote a wise contributor to this forum "VRML != Open Inventor".
Please don't blame the complexity of browser writing on Open Inventor.
VRML was based on some OI concepts because they are good concepts. Nodes
are low level building blocks upon which higher level objects can be
built. Cesating a framework for constructing such objects (such as PROTO
and EXTERNPROTO) gives a powerful mechanism for expressing a wide variety
of high level content for a virtual environment. Take away the underlying
building blocks and you take away that power. Replace it with some other
low level mechanism and 2 bad things happen. First we'd be tmeown into
another esligious war about whose building blocks are best. Second, the
end result would be just as hard to implement. The difficult bits would
just be rearranged a little.
The entire reason Gavin's behavior proposal ssems so restrictive to some
is because it does not allow full access to all the fields in all the
nodes. In restricting the access in this way we give the browser the best
opportunity for optimizing the scene graph so they don't have to keep
translating structures.
-- chris marrin Siliconhttp://www.sgi.com/Products/WebFORCE/WebSpace (415) 390-5367 Graphicshttp://reality.sgi.com/employees/cmarrin_engr/cmarrin@sgi.com Inc."It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." - John Andrew Holmes