[vos-d] XOD questions

[Reed Hedges]

Peter Amstutz wrote:
> No, and it shouldn't do that -- the goal is to have the XML DOM 
> structure reflect the VOS structure in a meaningful way.  If you spread 
> essential information for a single vobject all over the document such 
> that it requires that you must process the entire document before being 
> able to do anything, you're not really working with XML, you're working 
> with XML-flavored tag soup.
> 
> Of course, the internal cross-references we do have (mostly confined to 
> the <link> tag, I think, which *is* a special case) use VOS paths 
> instead of XML identifiers and anchors, but that's another discussion...
> 


The reason I ask is that I want to load some 3D objects from a COD file,
but then insert some non-3d children into one of those objects, and
extend its types. This is the kind of thing that VOS is all about :)
Practically speaking, I want to be able to re-export the 3D COD from
Blender and clobber it while keeping my non-3d extensions seperate.

I don't see why the XOD format should prevent stuff like that-- which
are important abilities we have in VOS.  If we have <link> why not
<parent> (or the parent attribute)? <parent> would just be the inverse
of <link>.

XML is too restrictive here. XOD is already very specific to VOS in its
element names; if you want to reuse a XOD along with some other XML
you're going to be applying a trasformation to it anyway, and I'm pretty
sure XSLT and XPATH are powerful enough to gather objects declared in
different places in the file that have parent child relationships.

Reed