Shape { 
    appearance Appearance { 
      # The following line is ILLEGAL; Inline is a grouping node! 
      material Inline { url "http://..." } 
    } 
    geometry Box { } 
  } 

Restricting Inlines to be like a Group with across-the-Web children makes implementing them much simpler and satisfies the need for a simple mechanism to distribute different parts of the scene graph across the Web.

     Inline { 
       url "http://....." 
       bboxCenter 0 0 0 
       bboxSize 10 10 10 
     } 

is equivalent to:

     EXTERNPROTO _DummyName [ ] "http://..." 
     Group { 
       children _DummyName { } 
       bboxCenter 0 0 0 
       bboxSize 10 10 10 
     } 

Like EXTERNPROTO, each Inline is unique, even if two Inlines point to the same URL. Since Inline's cannot be changed "from the outside," the only time this matters is if the URL file contains user interface sensor nodes that might be triggered. For example, someone might define a completely self-contained Calculator object that had buttons, reacted to the user pressing the buttons, and so forth. You could include two such calculators in your world by simply doing:

     Group { children [ 
       Transform { 
         translation 10 0 0 
         children Inline { 
           url "http://...../Calculator.wrl" 
         } 
       } 
       Transform { translation -10 0 0 
         children Inline { 
           url "http://..../Calculator.wrl" 
         } 
       } 
     ]} 

Each of the calculators would calculate independently. You could, of course, also have the same calculator appear in two places in the world using DEF/USE:

     Group { children [ 
       Transform { 
         translation 10 0 0 
         children DEF Calculator Inline { 
           url "http://...../Calculator.wrl" 
         } 
       }
       Transform { 
         translation -10 0 0 
         children USE Calculator 
       } 
     ]}