What I wonder is if a RenderMonkey tool wouldn't allow us to benefit from what Doug suggests is rapidly becoming an industry standard; in other words there are likely to be many site's producing free and commercial shaders among a user base that will be many times larger than 3DGS. I guess there is no reason why you couldn't produce what you prefer and maybe have room later to have a converter added as I think I read somewhere in the RenderMonkey documentation that all shaders can be exported in an XML format that can be easily parsed by the free MS XML parser.

By the way on a side issue when I try to view a sample shader I get

ATI RENDERMONKEY
Compiling pixel shader API(D3D) /Fire Effects/Fire/Single Pass/Pixel Shader/ ... success
FAILED to create 'Fire/Single Pass/Pixel Shader' pixel shader, selected compile target isn't supported by user's hardware.
The maximum pixel shader target that your hardware supports is 0.0
Compiling vertex shader API(D3D) /Fire Effects/Fire/Single Pass/Vertex Shader/ ... success

and don't see anything. I have DX9.0b installed so does this mean my hardware doesn't support this? Haven't found an answer in the documentation yet ....