Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

Hi There is a format that has been used with the H8/89 hard sectored disk called SVD. I like it in some ways but not in others. Things I like: It is in a human readable format Sectors are separated by white space and/or comments comments can be added Things I don't like: Format is octal ( I prefer hexadecimal ) Header contains various bit of information that are not decoded in a human readable form( still encoded as octal values ). I use a straight binary image file to transfer disk images to my H8's and H89. Converting the SVD format to one that I can use is trivial. The issue of reading the actual file from an image and placing that into a file is another issue. Each disk system uses a different directory structure and allocation method. How this could be simply encoded into the image files is more than I'd like to think about unless one would just settle for a textual description in the comment space. As an example, the H8/89 hard sectored disk have a volume number encoded in the header field ( that isn't part of the data ). The directory and allocation tables are pointed to by specific locations on track 0. They are not at specific locations. Other issues that might be a problem are things like the actual encoding methods used. Not all data is in nice 8 bit chunks ( my Nicolet does 20 bit chunks ). Inter leaving is usually not a great issue since it often only effects speed but it might be important. Dwight