Paraview VRML reader should not attempt VRML 1.0 files
This issue was created automatically from an original Mantis Issue. Further discussion may take place here.
The VRML loading code in paraview uses VTK's parser class (vtkVRMLImporter), which only handles VMRL 2.0. Paraview, however, will allow the user to open a VRML 1 file which, after parsing, produces a diagnostic message that does not point to the root cause (i.e. loading a VRML 1 file).
Suggest that Paraview disallow loading VRML versions other than 2. See mailing-list discussion http://www.paraview.org/pipermail/paraview/2011-November/023393.html
A comment in vtkVRMLSource::CanReadFile() says:
// Technically, the header should start with "#VRML V2.0 utf8", but who's // to say that new versions will not be forward compatible. Let's not be // perscriptive yet. If some future version of VRML is incompatible, we // can make this test more strict. int valid = (strncmp(header, "#VRML ", 6) == 0);
It's clear that this test should forbid VRML 1. I think it is also now clear that new versions are NOT forward compatible. VRML has been superceded by X3D (http://www.web3d.org/x3d/specifications/x3d/) which although it does have a VRML encoding (http://www.web3d.org/x3d/specifications/ISO-IEC-19776-X3DEncodings-All-Edition-1/) the header starts with "#X3D V3.0", not "VRML".