[x3d-public] Mantis issue 976: Implicit fields in Classic VRML encoding

[Yves Piguet]

Dear Roy, Don and Dick,

Thanks for your emails. I'm not very surprised. This suggestion was one of several to get a feeling of what could be considered by the Web3d Consortium, and not the most modest one. We've implemented it in our own js/webgl X3D version (Calerga VR, <https://calerga.com/vr/playground.html>; "Export x3dv/i" once you've loaded one of the models) and we use it (and like it) because it reduces significantly the amount of redundant information in x3dv files. We've dropped the exclamation marks in the proposal.

What I really hope is that the classical encoding will continue getting the attention it deserves. For me, it's the major advantage of X3D over more recent 3D apis: a format simple enough to quickly experiment with just a text editor, yet powerful enough to go beyond the basics. Imo, the XML encoding (and JSON which lacks comments and multiline text for scripts) are too cumbersome to be written by hand. I'm skeptical about the HTML encoding because it won't be seamlessly integrated in major browsers like SVG or MathML and will have compatibility issues with other X3D encodings and semantics. And HTML isn't much nicer than XML in a text editor or powerpoint slides.

Anyway, thanks again, and thanks for all your work on the public mailing list and in more private circles.

Yves

> On 23 Oct 2017, at 14:39, Roy Walmsley <roy.walmsley at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> 
> We recently reviewed this proposal in detail, as part of our updating of V3.3 of X3D to V4.0. We agreed that the “approach is likely to be technically feasible in most cases, and provides excellent insight. Nevertheless the benefits of terseness in VRML encodings is far outweighed by difficulties and problems associated with such a fundamental change in the grammar and in parser implementations. The editors do not want to pursue such a change.”