21 Oct 2003 RickMuller   » (Journeyer)

What happened to VRML? When it first came out I thought it was the answer to my prayers: a portable, easy to write, easy to read, non-propriatary format for 3d graphics. I guess that the size of the resulting files was one of the limitations. It is prohibitively expensive to ship non-trivial VRML files across the web. The lack of good viewers was another limitation: after SGI began to flounder, they spun off their Cosmo viewer, but I can't even recall the name of the resulting viewer -- I think it starts with a "C", but there's only so many times I'm willing to load a program that crashes my browser.

I really hate browser plug-ins, and am glad to see them dying. Why are separate applications such a bad thing? Why do we want one application (the web browser) to do everything?

My favorite VRML viewers are stand-alone. I like the VRMLView application from Systems in Motion, as well as the increasingly good and open source FreeWRL.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!