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Re: You call that a standard?

• To: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Subject: Re: You call that a standard?
• From: "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@l...>
• Date: Sun, 09 May 2004 16:55:35 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <5A951E6C-9994-11D8-B511-000A95A51C9E@t...>
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F711@h...> <5A951E6C-9994-11D8-B511-000A95A51C9E@t...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031208

Tim Bray wrote:

> ...
>
>> The VRML guys did the smart thing.  They formed
>> a consortium to work on the technology and
>> liased with ISO to get the documentation process
>> right.  It works stunningly well
>
>
> I'm glad to hear that VRML is working stunningly well, that word 
> hadn't reached my neck of the woods.
> ...

You might not realize it, but VRML lives on, with Java-enablement and 
extensions, in MPEG4 in the higher level profiles.
I wondered where it 'went' for a while and then read all of the MPEG4 
standards, and implemented the file format and scene description, while 
working for an MPEG4 video encoding company a couple years ago.  VRML is 
the basis for the generalized scene description language which is 
encoded as a hand-packed bit encoded (a la Huffman) specific-schema.  As 
long as you never extend it, that's somewhat ok, although you end up 
with a lot of specific parser code corresponding to everything.

That's not to say that anyone has really tried yet to create a complete 
MPEG4 player.  MPEG4 is truly the kitchen sink of "standards", er 
specfications.  I like it and am horrified by it at the same time.

That it includes VRML, Java, and a file format based on Quicktime is 
very interesting I thought.

sdw

-- 
swilliams@h... http://www.hpti.com Per: sdw@l... http://sdw.st
Stephen D. Williams 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 20147-4622 AIM: sdw

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