11 Aug
2004
11 Aug
'04
11:32 p.m.
Am 11 Aug 2004 15:41 meinte Cini, Richard:
>>XML is platform neutral because it's
basically ASCII, right?
Yes, true, but I think of XML more as a Web technology
requiring a complex
parsing engine.
Naa, XML parsing is as simple as parsing any other tagged format.
You just start at the beginning of the data stream and wait for
a tag start ('<'), identify the tab, and process the following
information (until the closing tag) as needed. That's all. For
my own little XML data storage I did an XML reader and writer in
Applesoft Basic in a few dozend lines. That's all what's needed.
Shure, if you want to do super-dooper-crunch-every-thing readers,
then it get's a bit more complex, but these are not realy needed
for real world applications (aka the ones realy getting the data
from a media or putting it back).
Another comment was made about the difference between
what's actually on the
media versus what the CPU actually sees. We would thus need to capture the
raw data stream from the "heads" side of the controller in order to
regenerate a usable original media from the metafile.
Not necersarry. it depends on the level you want to do. To me, 95%
of all media are written according to the standards described for
that media. Of course, if you look at the Amiga stuff, their main
concern are games with various kinds of protection schemes and non
standard encodings.
In fact, for most stuff even a logic definition based on the concept
of directories and files is sufficient. The average disk can be
duplicated on file level, an has not necersarry be duplicated on
block level, since the applications don't care. So why storeing
such stuff as disk image that preserves blocks?
For emulator use, we can grind this metafile through a
translation program
to get the bytestream. OR, the metafile could contain both types of data
(using the container file and metadirectory idea from earlier).
What we really need is PDF for magnetic media :-)
XML is the (base for a) PDF for digital media.
Gruss
H.
--
VCF Europa 6.0 am 30.April und 01.Mai 2005 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/