Developing standards is designed to increase productivity. Changing standards
too often can have a significant influence on the productivity of the user
community who build content using applications that implement these
standards. Updating standards with new features is mostly motivated by
exploiting faster hardware and enhanced operating systems. Because
developing new applications is time consuming and expensive, application
developers tend not to include the old standard file formats and create apps
using only the new standards. And so the issue of productivity is shared with
the application developer. The FreeWRL
software application (app) is a good
example where developers included both older VRML-1 and newer VRML-2
file format standards in their application. Recent releases of FreeWRL
now includes the newer X3D file format standard and honors the older
VRML-2 standard, but no longer honors the VRML-1 file format.
So how often is it reasonable to change the standard? How much responsibility
should the app developers assume by honoring the older file format standards?
So how often can the user community can rely on that standard not changing
or at least the app developers honoring the older file formats? So what is
reasonable? From my experience, if I have to rebuild content every ten years
this is excessive and discourages me from development. In my case I invested
many months to create 3D VRML-1 files of my second and fourth order tensor
glyphs and it took me over six months to create new VRML-2 files. No doubt
VRML-2 is better than VRML-1 and X3D has even more useful features. But
how useful is it for me, the content creator, to change my apps that generate
3D glyphs every ten years? Is it possible that newer apps could at least honor
the previous file format? File format converters are problematic and do not
solve the problem.