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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.<br>
<br>
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:<br>
<br>
<tt><Transform ...></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt> <children></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt> <Shape>...</Shape></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>
<Shape>...</Shape></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>
<Shape>...</Shape></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>
</children></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt> <metadata></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt> <MetadataString ... /></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>
<MetadataFloat ... /></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>
<MetadataInteger ... /></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>
<MetadataString ... /></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>
<MetadataString ... /></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>
</metadata></tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt></Transform></tt><tt><br>
</tt><br>
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.<br>
<br>
Do other people have any thoughts on this?<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<font class="tahoma,arial,helvetica san serif" color="#333366">
<font size="+1"><b>Leonard Daly</b></font><br>
3D Systems & Cloud Consultant<br>
X3D Co-Chair on Sabbatical<br>
LA ACM SIGGRAPH Chair<br>
President, Daly Realism - <i>Creating the Future</i>
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