[x3d-public] Inlining, importing higher profiles

[Andreas Plesch]

X-ITE is now loading support for some, less common components on
demand, eg. depending on profile and component statements in a scene.
This may lead to consequences on how external SAI and Inline are
treated which I want to clarify. I came across this since it affects
my dom bridge.

The question is if inlining or importing a Scene requiring a higher
profile (say Full) into a scene with a lower profile (say Interactive)
should be possible, eg. have the browser accept the higher profile
nodes.

The answer seems like the browser should just work with the higher
profile nodes, in both cases, Inline and
browser.replaceWorld(new_scene). But I could not find guidance in the
spec. and X-ITE currently does not do that since it only seems to load
needed components on loading of the initial scene.

The more common scenario is a higher profile Inline, which is using
say geospatial nodes, being inlined into a lower profile scene. I
think not specifying a profile for a scene just means the browser
should use its highest level of support since the point of profiles is
that a browser can warn or reject if it cannot support a scene. Is
that the main point ?

A question in this case is if SAI properties Scene.components or
Scene.profile should then report the elevated, higher level or the
original level.
Due to on-demand loading of additional libraries, there is some logic
for a browser to not support higher profiles in Inlines although it
could. Should there be a directive in the spec, to clarify that this
kind of elevating should be supported anyways, or should a decision be
left to the browser ?

For the dom bridge I use the importDocument and replaceWorld browser
services, for initial loading into a default empty Scene.
Since here the new scene completely replaces the old scene, there is
really no reason why a higher profile could not replace a lower
profile scene. But perhaps I am overlooking something since X-ITE does
not allow it ? Should this be explicitly allowed in the spec. ?
Here is a github issue: https://github.com/create3000/x_ite/issues/43





-- 
Andreas Plesch
Waltham, MA 02453