Everytime I go to a VRML conference or a meeting, I am amazed at the brilliance of the people involved in this effort. We have some truly great thinkers in our midst.

I am also amazed at how quickly these brilliant people lose their perspective. Despite the fact that VRML has yet to be embraced by the public (due in part to the difficulty it takes to produce and access), the community is continuing to make VRML more complicated.

I am not an enemy of progress. I see the need for a scripting language and a binary format. They are both good ideas as are many of the other improvements that are being suggested.

I do, however, feel that making the language so that worlds are more difficult to make and, therefore, view is asking for trouble. The more difficult the language is, the more difficult the tools are. The more difficult the tools are, the more likely the public will run into a broken world and ultimately be turned off to VRML.

If VRML dies, public indifference will kill it. So we have a responsibility to make sure our tools and worlds are easy to understand and not broken before we release them to the public. Remember, the term 'beta' is taking on a new meaning.

As we learned recently here at VRMLSite, the public only moves so fast. Although VRML 2.0 is better than its predecessor, clients may demand worlds in 1.0 simply out of cost pressures or fear of user difficulty. And the general public doesn't understand why a world designed for Cosmo Player doesn't look quite right in another browser. And they don't care. They are just dissatisfied.

So why am I spouting off? Because I want VRML to succeed. Progress is both good and bad. If VRML becomes too complicated, few will buy it and it will die from lack of exposure. Then we'll all have to store our VRML knowledge back in the same place we put Pascal and hope something comes up that is as fun, interesting and challenging as VRML.

I don't want to see that happen.

John Gluck -- Editor-in-Chief