X3D is the follow on for VRML, and is being defined by the Web3D Consortium.
Don Brutzman of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, created a template that allows an XML tool to translate X3D to VRML. We use this template to do our conversions.
FreeWRL now uses the utility xsltproc to convert from x3d to vrml; this utility should be found on all linux distributions. Future parsing without conversion is planned.