| Don; Congratulations on this working group, and of the moratorium on new nodes. Most certainly, the number of nodes in X3D, and the rate they are being placed, is staggering. Can I email my thoughts on this? Athough FreeWRL tries to support as many nodes as possible, I think that the X3D "problem" could be solved differently. This view comes from many years of hacking about with FreeWRL. Quite simply put, all of the Triangle and *2D nodes could be dispensed with. Same with some others. Focus should be on optimization techniques to render shapes quickly, on given hardware. What we appear to be doing is to move that optimization level up the food chain; making our job easier. That's not correct - we should be making the job of the authors (and, authoring programs) easier. X3D has missed the mark of abstracting the details of the graphics implementations from the users. It should be up to the browser implementer as to how to best send the data to particular hardware. If one can infer a relationship with computing languages, We are producing a "super assembler" - one that can do anything. The world, except for certain real time programming, does not use assemblers any more; it's much easier to write in Java or C or whatever, even if it is maybe not as efficient. When we write in Java or C, we expect the compiler/interpreter to make optimizations for us *that fit with the current hardware*. X3D seems to have missed that point. FreeWRL, by the way, treats most geometry identical internally. The end goal is to perform runtime optimizations on the data; whether that data comes from an Extrusion, ElevationGrid, IFS, TriangleSet, Mesh, whatever. We are not quite at performing major runtime optimizations yet; but it will come. Anyway, my two cents (Canadian :-); If you, or anyone else on the recipients list wishes to discuss this further, please email. ----------------------------------------------------------- John A. Stewart Team Leader: Networked Virtual Reality. Network Systems and Technologies - Systemes et technologies des reseaux Communications Research Centre Canada | Centre de recherches sur les communications Canada 3701 Carling Ave. | 3701, avenue Carling PO Box 11490, Station H | CP 11490, succursale H Ottawa ON K2H 8S2 | Ottawa (Ontario) K2H 8S2 |