I agree 150% because I begged for that clean up. The unfortunate reality was the people designing the Schema weren't that experienced with Schema design OR XML and they did some ill-conceived things. Schema was very new when they started (else RELAX would have been a better choice but it didn't exist then). Because I wrote the first DTD for VRML, the geometry straw man, I watched with horror as the Schema progressed, but because I was working for Intergraph where VRML and 3D on the web had been dismissed out of hand and *with prejudice*, there wasn't much I could do to be forceful.
I'm just saying the Schema per se isn't the problem. You could ignore that. It is the resulting warts in the instance that make it a PIA for loaders or transforms. I understand the disgust with CDATA. Microparsing is a solution for some problems but bad juju overall. There is a reason I, a markup wonk if ever there was one, stick to Classic VRML and VRML97. I will move on to X3D because eventually I will need some of the new features like Inlines with interfaces and bits like the Keyboard Sensor, the upcoming Network Sensor and the physics engine, or the Nice-to-Haves like the Boolean Sequencer that I can replicate in script but a node is easier. For now, I am building in VRML97 where the weather suits my clothes. Didn't mean to interrupt this fine design process. Back to the lurk. Best of luck with VOS. It should be quite cool. len From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter Amstutz My basic complaint with X3D was that the transition to XML could have been an opportunity to clean up a lot of the syntactical warts of VRML (delimiting index face sets with -1, for example) while still keeping the basic data model. We could have had a schema that follows the best practices for XML document design, follows XML data types, etc and would have been a breeze for developers to support. Instead, they choose to do a translation that amounted to little more than replacing curly brackets with pointy ones. Having written a minimalist X3D loader (just geometry) it irked me that I had parsing issues -- Parsing Issues, in XML! -- between files produced by two different programs because of the extra syntax embedded in CDATA that wasn't part of the DOM structure. I'm not saying it doesn't work, it is primarily an aesthetic issue -- but it does cause headaches for developers. _______________________________________________ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
