I haven't been paying attention to these discussions, so someone can slap me
if they wish.
COLLADA is a 3D XML format sponsored by Sony. I'm not sure whether it has
been submitted to a standards body or not. It is supported by many commercial
firms. VRML is an ISO standard, part of X3D. There are at least two
encodings for
X3D, a classic VRML encoding, and an XML based encoding.
There are discussions about COLLADA on the web3d.org site dating from March
2005. (search for COLLADA).
There have been efforts in the Web3D consortium to provide a
mapping between the two. I am unsure of status of that mapping.
Check for interested parties in the mail archives.
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Religious bent follows
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The main reason to go with an XML schema is that it is language
"neutral." The main
reason to not go with XML is that is language "neutral" (it is a language). It
all depends on what you want to interoperate with. Personally, for me, I think
it would be fine to interoperate with C++ globally declared variables
(assuming you
can find a compiler or interpreter that supports forward references). I tend
to think that conventional programming languages are more than up to the
task of doing serialization within the same language, and XML is unnecessary
in many cases. The C/C++/C#/Java community gave birth to the XML
monstrosity, no
need for people outside that community to leap on the bandwagon, unless of
course,
they want to interoperate with the C-style community.
P.S.: I program in Java. I have written serialization/deserialization
routines for
C++ data structures (in C++), and a SAX parser for textual Java Object[]
arrays (XML to
textual Object[] arrays and back to XML).
Admit to yourself: Do you really like XML?
John "Death to XML" Carlson
At 08:26 AM 4/26/2006, David Faught wrote:
>To save you the trouble of googling (huh?) here's a quick reference:
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA>
>I still tend to Google things as a reflex action, but now I usually read
>the Wikipedia entries first in the hits. Somehow that statement sounds
>like a nerd's bad joke. Here's another one: What do you call it when you
>search Wikipedia (like googling on Google)? Wikisee? Pedialight? WikiPeSea?
>
>Andreas Raab wrote:
> > ... I have never heard the name Collada before you mentioned it. And
> even right now (since I haven't googled it yet) I don't know what it is
> and how it relates to VRML or Croquet. Care to elaborate? ...
>
>Joshua Gargus wrote:
> > Is there any principled reason that you chose VRML instead of Collada?
> > Just curious.
Locked
