Neil Trevett On Open APIs

It's good to see Neil Trevett out and about. He needs the exercise. :-)

Openness of APIs will not protect the content authors from the death of platforms. If VRML taught us anything, it taught us that the IP-unencumbered standard language is the author's only hope for keeping content alive. Today, VRML97 worlds created in 1997 when Neil joined still run today. No other 3D format can make that claim.

Collada is good for assets but Collada and X3D have more in common than any of the competing APIs.

So good for Khronos and a boy howdy salute to Neil, but the openness story has a sequel called life cycle: what happens after the opening. The only solution here that does not mean signing up for a plug-in sharecropper economy is the open standard language.

Since Neil wrote the participation agreements for the Web3D Consortium that guarantee that, I'm sure he understands the point even if it does not play well with current marketing strategies for the more entrenched plug-in vendors such as Adobe who are declaring victory as the de facto rendering standard through their surrogates.