11 Aug
2004
11 Aug
'04
8:27 a.m.
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Cini, Richard wrote:
I was deadset against it myself until Hans pointed out its virtues
(mainly, human readability).
It's not necessarily XML, though it may eventually end up as such. Right
now I just see it has a system of tags for specifying characteristics and
segmenting data.
>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. I'm not a Web programmer so my thoughts on XML are probably
somewhat broken. 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.
If you're thinking in terms of having the original hardware around to
write the imagefile back to its original media (like I have), then getting
the data at a logical byte level is adequate. It depends on what your
eventual goal is for the image. Is it just to capture the data on the
medium so that it can be accessed in the future without regards to whether
the original hardware still exists? Or do you intend to be able to
reconstruct the physical medium at some point?
The spec should be able to handle either case.
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).
Or it could specify what data it contains, and then you would use it as
appropriate.
What we really need is PDF for magnetic media :-)
And other media as well (paper, plastic, etc.) That's what we're tyring
to do here. Hopefully we don't end up with something as bloated as PDF
however :)
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