This document is part of a collection of VRML2.0 history at http://www.mitra.biz/vrml/vrml2/mw_history.html

Critque of Gavin's 22Nov95 behaviors proposal

26Nov95 Mitra <mitra@mitra.biz>
This responds to the first of Gavin's proposals http://reality.sgi.com/employees/gavin/vrml/Newbehaviors.html to be written in terms of events. There is a rewrite that may fix some of the problems here, but I don't have access to it today. (Gavin, please date or number your proposals)

Overview

This paper is much better (from our perspective) than earlier "data-flow" or "constraint-based" versions. Most of this document addresses detail-oriented problems with it, ones that could probably be fixed easily.

Its still incomplete, and needs a companion paper to describe the API. We believe that getting the API right is in many ways much harder than designing the nodes.

However there is a deeper issue, which is that we don't see what advantages this proposal has (from SGI's perspective) over our earlier proposal. Comparing the set of concepts in his paper with ours, we see most of the component elements appearing in both.

Detailed comments

This part addresses the questions or problems with specific parts of SGI's proposal.