On 19 Mar 2004 18:15:39 -0500, Breton Slivka <Zen### [at] ZenPsychocom>
wrote:

>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!

Since I am the one to blame for the latest bringing up the issue, I
feel I should comment.

XML is definitely unsuitable for POV-Ray scene description. Most
people hand-code and the overhead of XML is a needless pain in the
behind. That's pretty much what most comments boil down to and my
personal opinion follows the same route.

However, ...

>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. 

...I personally believe XML might be worth a try (unofficially) as a
means to export already parsed POV-Ray scenes (prior to rendering) for
the purpose of converting to other formats -- at least the parts that
make sense. Surely it is not possible to convert the general POV-Ray
scene because basically everything is procedural - 99% of the
textures, and quite a lot of the objects (isos, julias, blobs to some
extent etc.) But there are definitely cases where one can benefit a
lot by some interoperation between POV and other packages, for example
by generating a city in POV using Chris Colefax' macros, then render
it in Terragen or even Radiance for the skies or lighting,
respectively.

>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. 

In any case if one decides to try to implement something along these
lines, it should be in an unofficial version. First of all, the next
version of POV (as of current development plans 4.0, release date as
usually unknown :) ) plans some major rewrite. Who knows what state
XML will be in by then? It might not make sense at all to use it
because it might be practically dead by the time 4.0 is out.

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

I don't think it's a stupid idea, but definitely one that needs a lot
of thought and planning to be taken seriously.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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