First of all, one piece of good news is that I found out that not Dassault, but actually Lattice developed 3DXML, an extention of their own Lattice XML. On websites about Lattice XML I also find the extension XVL bud have not yet found out what that is.
One site that looked interesting to me at first sight is http://www.sns.gov/APGroup/appProg/xal/xalDoc/gov/sns/xal/model/xml/LatticeXmlTest.html but perhaps it has nothing to do with this subject. After all it won't do us much good that there are zillions of sites about ordinary XML either.
And the best news so far is that I received a quick and dirty triangle only to .obj converter in Python script. So if any of you can read Python (my fav. scripting language, use it a lot in Paintshop) and change it into ruby, that would probably be all we need.
-Jim Foltz created an .obj importer for SU, is on scriptspot
-I guess most geometry that we would ever like to capture will probably be triangulated
-I believe all textures in 3DXML are stored either in their native format or as BMP. Finding binary blocks of data, copying, saving should be easy with any hex editor.
[Maggy]