Re: Fw: [x3d-public] Size of live Box

["George Anastassakis" <anastas@unipi.gr>]

First, I'd like to thank everybody for all replies, if find the level of 
support and quality of discussion on this list admirable.

Alan Hudson wrote:

> There is no way in X3D to say the difference between hiding a value and 
> being able to change a value.  Ie the only way to make that value 
> accessible is to change it from initializeOnly to inputOutput.

You lost me here... why not make it an outputOnly?

> Every time something is made initializeOnly its  because a browser
> implementor had a good case for how they could optimize speed
> or memory consumption based on the restriction.  Over time we
> can reexamine these decisions.  But each one was a premeditated
> action.

Of course...  like I said, it wasn't my intention to question that. Just for 
the
sake of (a very interesting) discussion, I see X3D as a complete, general-
purpose scenegraph representation and not only as something browser-
oriented, regardless of the spec. I've been using it as such for a few 
months
now in a particular context with fair success. For this reason, I felt that
optimization cannot be justified if it results in loss of functionality and, 
in
effect, a narrowing of the possible areas X3D can apply to.

> Another route you could use would be to drop the values into a metadata 
> node.  Ie if you have something generating the X3D, then when it writes 
> out the node it could also write out a description for your code to read 
> later.
>
> Box {
>    metadata MetadataString {
>       name "Size"
>       value ["3 2 3"]
>    }
>    size 3 2 3
> }

Yes, the metadata field has realy proven to be quite useful, quite often, 
but not
in the case I was describing which was to be able to calculate bounding 
boxes
for nodes in *any* X3D scenegraph, not necessarily writen or editable by me.

George

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