relative URLs VRML viewed from HTML-browsers

Steffen Meschkat ([email protected])
Fri, 12 May 95 12:41:19 0200

Relative URLs in a VRML scene get resolved with respect to the local temporary
file if webspace is fired from netscape following a link to a VRML document.
Thus, it is necessary to go within webspace directly to the respective URL if
one wants to follow links in the scene.

This is of course a specification and protocol bug, not one in webspace.
Nevertheles, this needs to get fixed urgently.

An information in the VRML document parallel to the HTML <BASE> tag would
do the fix.

Consider for instance the following convention to define an Info node tagged
BASE, whose string field contains the BASE URL of the document (i.e. the URL
relatively to which all relative URLs in the document are resolved):

DEF BASE Info {
string "http://www.artcom.de/vrml/welcome.wrl"
}

Then a WWWAnchor like

WWWAnchor {
name "next.wrl"
}

would point to the right URL http://www.artcom.de/vrml/next.wrl even if
webspace got the document from a temporary file created by e.g. netscape
following a link to the above mentioned URL (which is, by the way, not yet
active).

Such a mechanism should get into the final VRML/1.0, if still possible.

-- 


  Steffen Meschkat
  [email protected]