[vwrap] Cautionary thought...

[David W Levine <[e-mail]>]

As we bash around terms and flexibility and scope, once again. I want to
very gently raise one important cautionary thought, one I think very much
in line with
John's desire to start simple. There is an inherent tension between
flexibility and utility. The more things which can be negotiated and built
in ways which allow
parallel implementations of the same function, the greater the possibility
of creating two totally compliant implementations which can't interoperate
in any useful fashion.

Given the fact that virtual words are, at the end of the day about multiple
people seeing as close the same experience as possible, I think this is an
important point to keep in mind. We all share a desire to build a flexible,
extensible standard. But there are plenty of standards which don't actually
produce interoperability because so much is optional. No specific thing
being discussed here seems bad or out of place, but I do think it useful to
remind ourselves that there are traps at both ends of the spectrum.
Standards which are too narrow fail because they don't meet people's need
for features. Standards which are too broad fail because they don't
actually define enough things to ensure that complaint implementations can
do useful things. For virtual worlds, I strongly believe this trap lurks
more in "what we can display" then in how we move it, but it still does
matter.

Food for thought.

- David
~ Zha