Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 18:41, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Well going back to the image example, it's like trying to ftp a TIFF image to a remote server in ASCII mode. It's going to mess up, but anyone with any smarts either knows not to transfer in that way because it's going to mess up, or they inspect the data and realise that it can't be transferred as ASCII. If people didn't learn by being told something, common sense, or from their mistakes, then we probably all wouldn't still be here :-) Same goes for any line termination issues; archivists would not be daft enough to transfer data from one medium to the next and then destroy the original (or if they did destroy the original, they'd be damned sure that the copy matched the original *exactly* first). Whilst the average person does make silly mistakes and then typically learns from them, I'd expect anyone preserving or dealing with historical data to have a few more smarts about them in the first place! And if someone *does* want to transfer the data between systems and there's *really* no way of turning off features that will mangle binary data - well, that's exactly why we design the spec with lots of flexibility in mind, and they can always convert the data to a different format should they wish. All a question of providing lots of choices whilst keeping within a strict specification so that people can choose what suits them personally I suppose, whilst knowing that the data should still be usable in the future... cheers, Jules