11 Aug
2004
11 Aug
'04
10:43 p.m.
On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 22:54, Steve Thatcher wrote:
what is wrong with making things easier? If a small
amount of effort
could be put out to make the image file have a more useful purpose
then to ONLY be able to create media, why not? Your view seems to be to
make all the emulators tyhat are currently available not work anymore
because now they have to be modified to access an image file. My
idea is to not change all that, make the image file simple enough to
extract data.
I'd strongly recommend doing exactly that. Keep the data seperate from
the metadata describing it. Mixing the two really detracts from the
human readability aspect for starters - browsing a file with nicely
formatted structured data peppered with streams of encoded media data
(whether hex pairs, base64 or whatever) would give me a headache :-)
Aside from that, as Steve says, if someone wants to access the media
data itself without worrying about the extra cruft in the archive, they
can.
We've all seen good specs die before simply because they wasn't enough
of an incentive to use them outside of their specialised area - as a
viable project this is much more likely to work if it's easy to adopt by
anyone who currently has tools to do a similar thing (or a subset
thereof)
cheers
J.