[x3d-public] Use of containerField in V4+

[Leonard Daly]

A long (Internet-) time ago, the X3D Working Group came up with the idea 
of containerField to indicate which child element belonged to which 
parent field. This only really applies when an X3D node has fields that 
can be nodes. E.g., Transform can have 'children' to define geometry and 
appearance and metadata to define metadata. Most of the time the 
relationship is obvious, especially when a field can can only contain 
one type of node.

In all of the XML I have seen for many other applications (documents, 
books, medical records, government records, etc.) do not use that sort 
of structure. Everything is put into explicit child nodes. That would 
mean something like Transform would be:

<Transform ...>
     <children>
         <Shape>...</Shape>
         <Shape>...</Shape>
         <Shape>...</Shape>
     </children>
     <metadata>
         <MetadataString ... />
         <MetadataFloat ... />
         <MetadataInteger ... />
         <MetadataString ... />
         <MetadataString ... />
     </metadata>
</Transform>

This completely eliminate the ambiguity of use without a containerfield 
with the expense of adding in an extra layer for every use. I think this 
format is easier to read and certainly parses easier in standard parsers 
that come with PHP and Perl.

Do other people have any thoughts on this?

-- 
*Leonard Daly*
3D Systems & Cloud Consultant
X3D Co-Chair on Sabbatical
LA ACM SIGGRAPH Chair
President, Daly Realism - /Creating the Future/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://web3d.org/pipermail/x3d-public_web3d.org/attachments/20151214/ed500864/attachment.html>