[x3d-public] MFString quotes

[Yves Piguet]

> On 15 Mar 2017, at 15:35, Don Brutzman <brutzman at nps.edu> wrote:
> 
> Short summary:
> 
> a. The abstract specification is unambiguous.

Imo, XML applications like the XML encoding of X3D shouldn't restrict XML, or they shouldn't claim to be XML. So 19776-1 should be modified.

> b. Different file and language encodings have similar yet different rules about escaping quotes.
> c. We have no control over external equivalences, since user agents decide independently (e.g. " and ")

I agree.

> d. Round-tripping is difficult/tedious but possible in every case.  Repeatable code blocks can help.

Usually possible for a given implementation. If you think round-tripping is useful, one should refer to a canonical XML representation. See https://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n

Same for JSON. Same for Classic (standardized pretty-printed?)

> I think one relaxation might be possible where an unquoted MFString value might be treated as a single SFString value in the array.

I'd rather not. The more permissive, the more difficult it will be to fix design oversights later if there are. XML isn't nice to write by hand anyway, one shouldn't try to accept sloppy code.

For instance, in XML all attribute values must be quoted, unlike HTML. Being lenient here would go against this design choice.

Best,

Yves