model/vrml

The 3D web of 1997, preserved in amber — and the reason the model/ top-level type exists at all: RFC 2077 created the entire model branch of the MIME tree in January 1997 with VRML as its founding citizen. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (ISO/IEC 14772, the VRML97 edition) described walkable scenes in text at a moment when neither bandwidth nor GPUs could deliver the dream; its successor X3D inherited the ideas, and glTF eventually delivered the web-3D reality. Files announce themselves with an ASCII first line — #VRML V2.0 utf8 for VRML97 — so the format is self-identifying in a way most of its era was not.

.wrl is the standard extension; gzip-compressed worlds circulated as .wrz.

Defined by RFC 2077 · IANA registration. Registry facts from the IANA media-types registry via mime-db.