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.