Re: TECH Survey comments

Mark Waks (justin@dsd.camb.inmet.com)
Wed, 3 Aug 94 12:56:39 EDT


Linas writes:
>To me, this proposal seems overly complex. I'd rather see a solution
>that benefits all URL's, rather than just 3D URL's. That is, have some
>scheme where somehow local servers could serve up popular URL's by serving
>up a local copy, instead of going over the net. Don't know if anyone
>is working on this.

In principle, I could live with this -- it doesn't get the object
"hierarchy" that I'd like to see, but it does get the distributed
database of objects, which I regard as essential. The problem is, it's
a bit out of the scope of the VRML project, and I don't know if anyone
is working on quite this. I'm willing to believe that it's under
development, but don't have any reason to believe it necessarily is --
it's simply not as essential for conventional HTML as it is for VRML,
since HTML tends not to be built out of standard "building blocks".
(It's still *useful*, as a mechanism for distributing extremely
commonly-accessed HTML pages, but I'd bet that it's only about 1% as
useful for HTML as for VRML.) Also, it's a moderately hard problem in
the more general case -- you've got lots of interesting problems (eg,
dectecting out-of-dateness) that don't map in any particularly obvious
way to URLs...

Again, anyone have any idea if this sort of generalized mechanism
is being worked on by the URL community? (I'm not even sure how
organized the "URL community" is...)

-- Justin
Who, based on his Web experience, really
does expect object caching/distribution
will be essential to a *pleasant* VRML
experience...

Random Quote du Jour:

You Know You're in the SCA when...
...you're a burly guy who looks like a Hell's Angel, but you do
embroidery in public.
...you hide the really awful costume references in the stacks at
the library, so future costumers won't be led astray. Or, you write
criticisms in the margins of said awful costume references.
-- Lothar