Consider your inventory. A mess huh. Well, what is it really, especially in a world like NGIW / OMG describes? It's just yet another hierarchy of folders and thingies. We are probably wasting our time writing any code for it. Why not leverage the users favourite hierarchy browser/editor. Maybe it's called FileDamager made by MicroCruft in Redstone Wishangton. Maybe it's called Netscape, or Nautilus. Many of the modern file browser tools will talk a protocol named WebDAV. If the asset server spoke WebDAV, then we could perhaps rip the inventory code clean out of the client.

This little fantasy points in a really blue sky direction. Use existing protocols and tools to remove stuff from the client. Make it easy for tools that already exist to interact with the 3d world.

That's the Client Hammer. ClientHamr is the concept that we can apply the unix philosophy to the viewer. Use individual tools that are good at their job to split off bits of the big bad blob that is the viewer. Using standard protocols and tools where we can.

Note - The simian grid has a WebDav front end to inventory. http://code.google.com/p/openmetaverse/