Why are DEF names in createVrmlFromString(), createVrmlFromURL(), and Inline nodes not accessible from the getNode() method?
Marrin: A: The DEF name capability in VRML is a syntactic construct which allows nodes to be USE’d and routes to be defined between nodes in the same VRML file scope. It was never intended as a runtime name dictionary facility. The EAI presented a problem to VRML in that it has no implicit knowledge of any nodes in the world, and it exists outside any file scope, so it has no access to any nodes by name. It was decided to overload the semantics of DEF names to allow the EAI to get access to named nodes using the getNode() browser method. This was limited to nodes named in the base file (the file used to construct the original world or the file loaded with loadURL). Allowing DEF names created in any other scope (i.e., createVrmlFromString, createVrmlFromURL or Inline nodes) to add to the names accessible from the EAI would cause several problems: – Since there is no name dictionary management facilities, there is no way to remove names once they are added. Over time, thousands of named
