The MIME spec about text/* files specifies that CRLF (or the other way
around???) is the "correct" way to send text/* files. Fortunately,
most packages will look for CR, LF, or CRLF and do
something appropriate.
This has only become an issue with Netscape/Mosaic/etc since they
transfer EVERYTHING in binary mode. We ran into this problem when
getting text/tab-separated-values onto the WWW Viewer Test Page
and Mac TSV viewers were barfing on UNIX text files, since
to a Mac, everything was all on one line.
Since VRML files are text, the same issues hold. Fortunately, most
VRML browsers are smart enough to deal with CR, LF, CRLF issues
correctly. The other issue is the trailing ^Z, which is indeed
after the closing '}'. And yes, WebSpace can't handle it. The
addition of ^Z is old-DOS and (fortunately) not many editors still
do it.
It's probably easier to say that VRML files may only contain the
following ASCII codes and call everything else "bad":
10
13
0x20-0x7E
than to try to arbitrarily ignore characters that you don't want
to see since some editors like to put in cutesy codes (e.g. Mac)
for "special" versions of common codes. I keep getting
mail from Mac folks where the ' character has been replaced with
something Mac-cute which I can't see (I know this because my mail
package turns the Mac-cute character into a space and so it looks
like this: can t ). It's important to know when this
occurs instsad of just ignoring those characters.
Scott Nelson
--+----------------------------------------------------+ |Scott D. Nelson B131 Rm2074 3-1250 | |Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | |7000 East Ave., L-153 Livermore CA 94550 | |email:
[email protected]http://www-dsed.llnl.gov/ | +----------------------------------------------------+