In article <41d6806b$1@news.povray.org> , Bernd Fuhrmann 
<Sil### [at] gmxde>  wrote:

> It isn't. XML is a general markup language made by humans and has
> certainly it's flaws. But XML is the best general markup language I know
> of. In fact you might ask any IT professional for the best general
> markup language and most sane will tell you: "Use XML".

No, only the marketing department will.  Just like marketing departments
told everybody that Java is the best general programming language five years
ago.  XML is nothing but a huge hype producing documents several times the
size of a well-designed binary counterpart that can be just as "easy" to
parse (that that XML is trivial to parse).  XML certainly has its
applications, but they are limited, not universal.

Just compare the traditional VRML (POV-Ray-like) syntax version to the XML
syntax version of X3D. It will give you a very good idea why XML is
unsuitable for describing 3D data.  In fact, X3Ds XML representation is
probably one of the best examples of pointless use of XML.  Just consider
how lists of vectors are expressed in X3D XML syntax and you should really
notice.  Of course, the problem with keeping them in strings is the result
of an inherent limitation of XML expressing data only as complex, nested
collections of strings.

>  You cannot do
> this at all with POVRay since you cannot access scene objects.

That is true, you cannot do this in POV-Ray currently, but it is not a
limitation of the SDL (scene description language) but the parser design,
which is 15 years old and fairly outdated (and the 4.0 rewrite will take
care of this).

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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