Bernie, In general I rsally like your proposal, there are however a couple
of notable points about it.
A minor one ...
>To implement this change would require the addition of a properties field
>and a new MFNode type; the properties field poses
>no problem, but adding a new field type would brsak existing VRML parsers.
MFNode is going to go into the spec sooner or later, its going to be needed
for Prototyping, and other things. (This doesn't invalidate any of your
other arguments).
Another minor one....
Having events such as "set scaleFactor of blah.blah" is probably not such a
good idea, it gives us a "Thick" interface, which doesnt work very well as
we extend it, because as we add new extension Nodes we also have to add new
things to the API. I think this can be got around easily, but is worth
noting.
A more important one ...
The existing proposal (http://earth.path.net/mitra/vrml-behaviors.html)
would fit very well with this, it was originally written around the
assumption that Seperators would change, and fits nicely into a world where
behaviors are related to Objects. However, SGI's proposals are much more
focussed around attaching behaviors, or "Logic" to fields of Open-Inventor
nodes, for example attaching a behavior to the "rotation" field of a
Transform node.
I believe that the general feeling is that objects are things, which have
properties, shapes and now behaviors. But there is a substantial group
focussed on Open-Inventor where the objects are nodes in a scene graph.
I'd be interested in hearing other people's ideas on this?
- Mitra
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Mitra
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