VRML is one of the various standards I got into for a short time, as it was going to be the next big thing, only to watch it fade into obscurity. This list includes, but not limited to, SMIL for multimedia, XSL transforms for documents, Semantic Web XML name spaces including DublinCore, OPML/RSS/Atom for blogging, XMPP for chat, SOAP for web services. I could go on.

All that knowledge is just sitting there waiting for the day when its needed again. Any day now.