On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 06:15:39PM -0400, Reed Hedges wrote: > The reason I ask is that I want to load some 3D objects from a COD file, > but then insert some non-3d children into one of those objects, and > extend its types. This is the kind of thing that VOS is all about :) > Practically speaking, I want to be able to re-export the 3D COD from > Blender and clobber it while keeping my non-3d extensions seperate.
So, it sounds to me like you want to append file A and file B to produce file C, and that some of those pieces in file B are intended to modify pieces of file A. I see why you might want to do that. Obviously you can't just 'cat' two XML files together, although with a little regular expression text mangling you could knock off the end tag of A and the start tags of B to yield something that will produce a valid XML document when glued together -- but this seems like a hack. I think a more elegant solution would be a program that merges two XOD files together by matching up vobjects to produce the final product. It's a little more work, but the solution is a lot more general purpose -- in fact, using the s4 loader interface, you can write the merge code once and then be able to use it to annotate both XOD and COD as well as imported files like ASE, 3DS, etc. > I don't see why the XOD format should prevent stuff like that-- which > are important abilities we have in VOS. If we have <link> why not > <parent> (or the parent attribute)? <parent> would just be the inverse > of <link>. Well, I feel like it should be more purely declarative and reflected by the DOM structure, and not require that you have to in effect execute a stream of commands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in a specific order scattered around the file to reconstruct the vobject structure. The Vobject structure is (mostly) a tree, not log-structured data. > XML is too restrictive here. XOD is already very specific to VOS in its > element names; if you want to reuse a XOD along with some other XML > you're going to be applying a trasformation to it anyway, and I'm pretty > sure XSLT and XPATH are powerful enough to gather objects declared in > different places in the file that have parent child relationships. Well, the idea was more to support the ability to import other file formats (X3D comes to mind, although it's maybe not a good example since it's really an example of how not to design an XML schema) using a straightforward XSLT transform. Of course, we haven't yet tried writing any transforms so I don't know if it's actually feasable. -- [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ]
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