Okay well, as often happens when I've got a ton of work to get done, I've 
come up with a ton of ideas that I probably won't have the opportunity to 
implement, completely unrelated to anything I have to do. Fun.

So, I know that there's been much talk about using XML for povray scene 
description language, and a lot of sunk in povray purists will have none 
of it! Well, I'm sure there's really good reasons for it, but hear me out 
anyway. I'd like to share, and I figured I need someone to either tell me 
I'm being retarded, or that it's a great idea, or whatever and maybe I'll 
be able to move on to some real work!

I've been reading quite a bit about XML, X3D (new vrml), XSLT, and DTD, 
all  are very neat technologies, most with a tiny drawback. They're 
terrible at handling binary format. Apparently X3D will have 3 versions. 
A classic curly bracket version of syntax, an XML compatible syntax, and 
a binary syntax, each with it's own advantages. This got me thinking 
about povray, of course.

My idea is that it may be possible to implement the same type of idea for 
povray.  

Suppose a standard XML syntax were established that implemented most or 
all of the features of povray SDL, with correct nesting and such and all 
that, with its own DTD and everything. 

Then, you could use XSLT language to create a converter, which would be 
able to translate between standard SDL, and this XML version, easily and 
quickly.

now this is the part that's really weird, and very likely dumb:


The DTD for the XML syntax could be used to create a binary version of 
the povray language. That is, each opening and closing tag could be 
assigned its own byte, or word, and be assembled into sort of a binary 
shorthand of the XML syntax. 

This by itself brings the advantage of smaller filesizes for huge 
datasets like meshes, and such, which at this point uses huge amounts of 
data, uneccesarily by storing vector and context information as ascii 
characters. 

This would also bring the advantages that XML brings, of easy 
portability, parsing, and flexibility of presentation, eliminating the 
difficulties involved in creating alternative rendering engines for quick 
preview of povray scenes. 

Suppose then that a patch in povray would allow the automatic translation 
between these 3 formats, and the direct parsing of the formats into 
internal tokens. 

This may bring a number of other advantages that I won't mention here.

Anyways, I'd be interested in hearing why this is a stupid idea.


-Zen

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