The more things change the more they stay the same. VRML recast itself in XML when you had to be XML to be taken seriously and now Web3D is mostly the same stuff reborn in the HTML5 era.
VRML described the vertices and edges of 3D objects, but surely it had nowhere near the power of OpenGL or WebGL. With vertex shaders and fragment shaders there is almost no limit to what can be done with OpenGL in terms of imagery you can produce. I never heard that VRML had anything like that.
In fact I would bet that a VRML renderer could be implemented in pure JS + WebGL.
