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As a contributor to that book, it was ahead
of the specification and standard.
I wrote the X3DML section. At that
time, there wasn't an official name.
In the intervening time from its
publication, there have been platform changes
(eg, the SP2 upgrade) and the promise of
namespace-based integration has yet
to be realized outside the MS framework
itself. Microsoft still dominates the desktop
and dropping anything into IE requires CSS-namespace registration for dlls (eg,
CSS behaviors).
In other words, common object model standards are required and
the Web browser
world has not matured to that
point.
XML benefits are not the same as 'dropping
3D onto a page'. XML provides
built in parsing, validation, database
middleware, XSLT conversion, and so on,
but drag and drop inclusion isn't possible and isn't likely in
browsers where X3D or any
other XML application language doesn't have
native support. It is possible
to download components on request but so
far, that is still a future.
To further your dissertation, you should
talk about the architecture of web
browsers as realized in n-tier
systems. What are the problems of
n-sets of data types that have to be mapped
to n-sets of rendering primitives
in the contexts controlled first by the
browser container, and then by the
resources of the operating
system. Plugins were the obvious means
of extensibility. At the end of
the day, an XML application is, as Rick
Carrey observed, just a tag stack, a bag o'
properties with a URI.
len
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