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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: The Power of Groves: The VRML View
 On Thu, 10 Feb 2000 19:18:31 -0600, you wrote: >Because it is always hard to get started from an existing language >and its meta-definitions, then map to another meta-language or >framework of definitions, I am presenting an abbreviated version >of the VRML language as described in Late Night VRML 2.0 with >Java (Couch, Ballreich, Roehl and Brown). What I'd like to see is a reasonably concise description of how XML was found to be unsuited to the task. What specific features (or lack thereof) of XML notation made it inappropriate for VRML? What kinds of structural relationships were you trying to model for which XML notation was too cumbersome? Where I'm coming from: Unlike Peter and probably most of the others participating in this discussion, I'm actually very comfortable discussing all of this in abstract terms. (Perhaps it's because I'm a physicist by training--I don't know.) And I do strongly feel that looking at the abstract picture is the way to understand precisely where any deficiencies may lie. I understand and agree that in order to make all of this great stuff accessible to web page designers and the like, we need to come up with something that isn't going to cause them to just roll their eyes, throw up their hands, and walk away. But I don't think we can build usable tools unless we have a firm, formal foundation, one which will inevitably include numerous abstract models. Without that foundation, we're just chasing our tails. No matter what "standard" is agreed upon, users of tools based on that standard are going to quickly find significant limitations, which will launch another round of standardization, and so on ad infinitum. With a solid foundation, we can be confident that the tools that we build on top of it have some hope of standing up to practical use. We need to make this stuff accessbile, but first we need to make it work. I'm an experienced software developer; I've written parsers, interpreters, sophisticated text and graphics rendering engines, etc. Complex modeling and programming issues don't scare me. What scares me is the possibility that I'm going to embark on a major journey using groves as a fundamental data abstraction for a very large project, and then a year from now I'm going to hit a brick wall because of some unforeseen deficiency. -Steve Schafer 
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