PHIL: more machine thoughts

Kevin Goldsmith (kmg@monk.colossal.com)
Wed, 15 Jun 1994 14:39:33 -0700


ok, I was just thinking about something. Machine, smachine. we are developing
a 3D graphics description language here, not a rendering engine. It's kind of
silly to worry about the baseline machine, because that is a browser issue, not
a language issue. What we do need to worry about is the best ways to make that
language work well over a distributed network, period. We'll need to do that
anyway. We also want to make it possible (although not required) to have
multiple representations of the same object at different levels of detail /
rendering ability, but it will still be up to the browser to implement picking
between these different representations. So the baseline machine discussion is
an interesting sideline, but it is just that, a sideline. Likewise is
discussion of navigation (flying/walking/etc), that is a browser issue, not a
language issue.

I do like the idea that someone had before about having a 2D picture at the
lowest level of detail, as long as that picture had hot buttons which
corresponded to the hot objects in the scene, ala Director or Hypercard.

KEvin