It turns out that Michael(?) Powers(?) (aka pow, on the Flatland forums), was also part of the Web3D consortium, but at the time they didn't have what he was looking for, and after my post on the Flatland forums about X3D, he said he'd have to take a look at it...or something like that.
Yes, I remember Michael. We shared some good emails on the topics of 3D systems and XML. Good man and ahead of the learning curve.
As most Mlers know, markup alone won't do a job. The power is in the object model as reflected in the representation (ie, the file format). It is good for different models and languages to evolve for specific needs, some more or less general than others. What one hopes to achieve, and this not without considerable hard work and slogging, is to get standards that enable the greatest amount of information reuse. While not covered in the article in depth, the components and profiles may help tease apart the datatypes (loosely used term here) such that real time 3D graphics on the web can better share data, data can live longer and the customer gets the best possible deal from the tools. This has enormous potential benefits in the computer aided design, geographic information systems and location based systems, and animation technologies. Consider for example, being a teacher in an elementary or middle school system preparing a history lecture on the cultures of Mesopotamia. Where museums keep 3D models of artifacts of these cultures, X3D and other conforming languages can get those models and include them in a lecture, then give an assignment to a class team to see who can write and animate the best historically accurate story using the artifacts as props.
Consider an aircraft instructor with students that must master several different and highly complex aircraft in the course of a career. To get them into the air efficiently and most cost effectively, pilots require more time in the specifics of each aircraft type. Time spent tutoring fundamentals of flight for this class of aircraft is time not spent tutoring specifics. The ability to get information from the original CAD design models, dedensify it for training simulations, then push that out to a non-local distribution system such as the web is an enormous advantage in all dimensions of that challenge.
I hope Michael does take a look at X3D if for no other reason than to determine the potentials for sharing data among the different ML languages. That is exactly why we went to XML,
why XML came from SGML, and what markup as an enabling technology is there to do.
Sorry it's taken me a while to respond. I do happen to agree with the things you said. One suggestion, why not join the Flatland forum (http://www.flatland.com/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi) so that you can help with ideas and such for the next version of 3DML and Rover, even if it's just to offer insight.
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