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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Roy did a very detailed analysis of
statement location. <br>
<br>
I think that any discussion of IMPORT / EXPORT statements may be
premature until it is figured out how files and their nodes will
be inlined in HTML. There is a single namespace and namescope in
HTML causing the following issues when X3D is integrated with DOM:<br>
<br>
1) All nodes are available to all other nodes at all times<br>
2) IMPORT does not have any meaning <br>
3) EXPORT does not have any meaning<br>
4) Uncertain how to handle a file that gets Inlined more than once
since all DEF and ID from the Inline will be duplicated<br>
<br>
Possible solutions are:<br>
A) Do not put the contents of any Inline into the DOM<br>
B) Do not put the contents of any X3D file into the DOM<br>
C) Modify the DEF & ID values on each Inline so they are
unique<br>
<br>
(A) has the potential problem of completely hiding all of the
interior nodes and making it unavailable. In this case IMPORT and
EXPORT can be defined to make sense by providing access to those
fields. Unfortunately this breaks a different goal of full DOM
integration.<br>
<br>
(B) This is like (1), but more extreme. It essentially makes X3D
plugin-like in that there is complete separation between DOM and
X3D.<br>
<br>
There is a variant on (A)/(B) where only certain (developer
controllable) Inline contents are loaded into the DOM. This
partially breaks the goal of DOM integration and still leaves the
problem of keeping DEF/ID values unique (C)<br>
<br>
(C) This solution creates a virtual namescope in that the DEF/ID
values are modified so that they are unique within the parent DOM.
This is potentially tricky since these values can be
programmatically assembled. It might be possible to make all of
the necessary modifications to the nodes in the Inline file, but
unsolvable (or close to it) to change other code in either the
parent or other Inline nodes that may cross-refer to those values.<br>
<br>
<br>
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<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>
LA ACM SIGGRAPH Chair<br>
President, Daly Realism - <i>Creating the Future</i>
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