Hi Bernd,

"Bernd Fuhrmann" <Sil### [at] gmxde> wrote in message
news:41d51598@news.povray.org...
> Hi!
>
> I just thought if it might be possible to use XML to describe a scene.
> ... snip ...
> I'd like to know if there is already such a system planned or implemented.

It is already possible to use VRML to describe a scene (not a POVRay scene).
VRML has been about since about 1994.
There is a project working to convert it to an XML base (xVRML) as it was
originaly based on SGML principles. In fact I think they released an XML
schema for it way back in 2003.

It sounds like it might be of interest to you as it already supports flying
through scenes, which is the sort of thing you would need for use with a
head up display.
You can also bookmark 3d positions in a scene so that the user can fasttrack
the view point to those positions.

> ...snip ...  Is anyone except me interested in implementing such a system?
> What do you think about this idea?

I think there are probably lots of people on the VRML news groups and in the
xVRML community that are interested in such a system.

I myself took a brief interest in this before discovering POVRay. I, like
you, am quite happy to dive into coding markup languages by hand, but what
put me off VRML (and the concept of using tagged markup languages for scene
description in general) is the enourmously verbose manner used to describe
an object.
As has already been mentioned, POVRays Scene Description Language provides a
highly elegant and concise yet flexible way to describe objects.

I found that even to describe relatively simple objects in VRML 1.0 was
cumbersome. It may have improved with the more recent versions of VRML, but
I think it's more down to the nature of markup languages. Nowadays I think
people probably use converters to generate anything but the simplest VRML
scenes, and even then I've never seen any VRML scenes that come close to the
sophistication of some of the newbie POVRay scenes posted on the povray
newsgroups.

>
> Thanks in advance
> Bernd Fuhrmann

So I think the concept of using an XML, VRML, xVRML or other tagged markup
language to describe 3D scenes has a place.
But I very much prefer the POVRay SDL for the sort of things you see POVRay
being used for and would direct anyone advocating changing it in the
direction of a tagged markup language to take a look at why VRML hasn't
grown into this space in the 10 years it's been about.

Regards,
Chris.

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