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

[Yves Piguet]

John,

I'm more interested in interactive accurate behavior based on physical/technical models than in photorealistic scenes. It isn't a matter of learning authoring tools. I want to push boundaries further.

JSON doesn't support comments natively, nor multiline text. The X3D JSON encoding emulates comments with existing JSON constructs and multiline scripts with arrays, iirc. I don't find that pretty, but I guess it's ok for an exchange format which usually remains hidden. Imo the JSON encoding is conceptually much closer to XML than classical.

Our export support is more to validate our import implementations, to check roundtrip. I know JSON is easy to generate, we do it from internal js structures. We actually really write x3dv/i by hand. You can check the source code of https://calerga.com/vr/servo.html if you're interested.

I hope you don't mean that the classical encoding is abandoned.

Yves

> On 26 Oct 2017, at 16:21, John Carlson <yottzumm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yves,
>  
> We’ve got some comments in JSON.   I believe it’s documented.  If not, it should be.  I think you should use an external JavaScript file and reference it by @url in the Script node, if you like multiline JavaScript—It’s probably better for code editors anyway.  I’d have to check what X3DJSONLD does with this.
>  
> JSON is really close to VRML, I think.
>  
> We’re not asking you to write anything by hand, except script, not even VRML.  Yes, some touch up on the scenegraph perhaps.  You should invest in learning an authoring tool if you want to do serious work.
>  
> If your exporting classic encoding, of course your have a vested interest in maintaining it.  But I suggest you start investing in the JSON format.  It should be easily buildable with JS by using native JavaScript data structures.  If it’s hard to build, may I suggest that you offer suggestions for improvement?  I’d like to make it really easy to construct JSON, and I don’t have a DOM -> JSON converter yet, but I’m close.  Want to help?
>  
> John
>