Date: Jul. 30, 1998
Link: http://www.vrml.org/WorkingGroups/dbwork/vrmlxml.html
Source Author or Organization: Daniel Lipkin, Oracle Corporation

VRML, the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, is the ISO standard for representing 3D on the Web. It provides a versatile platform for a variety of applications that use 3D as a central metaphor or interface. One of the strengths of VRML is its tight integration with a variety of other web technologies and its ease of incorporating the benefits of those technologies, from graphic, audio, and video formats to scripting languages and network protocols. Another powerful feature of VRML is its easy extensibility and ability to add new node types and capabilities to the base language.

One of the most significant new web standards to emerge recently is XML, the Extensible Markup Language. XML defines a standard format for representing and exchanging structured data on the web, enabling the use of a standard API, the Document Object Model (DOM), for managing that data, and the deployment of standard services for generating and viewing XML content.

XML has already been widely adopted by an industry eager to overcome the limitations of HTML for structured data. XML is expected to become a standard means for delivering database-driven web content, and already serves as the basis for a variety of web applications, from metadata representation to domain-specific markup languages.

Although designed originally for different problem domains, the two technologies of VRML and XML have much to offer each other, and there are a variety of areas where tighter integration between the two can provide powerful benefits. Some existing work in this area already exists; for example, the Visual XML proposal for using XML and VRML to represent and display structured information spaces. This paper investigates additional potential areas of synergy and suggests useful next steps.