1 Jun
2000
1 Jun
'00
6:10 a.m.
On Thu, 1 Jun 2000, Pete Turnbull wrote:
That's part of the reason I think an encoded
format is a bad idea. Hans'
suggestion of a tagged format using XML (or something else) is much better.
It allows for decoding without referring to a central archive, and it's
much more flexible and extensible. Sure, it takes more space, but is that
But a lot more volumnious. But this is just my prejudice speaking. Even
though I find HTML useful, I hate it.
a problem? The tags don't all need to be ASCII
text, things like the
sector size could be integers, and field lengths could be limited. I'd
envisage something like nested objects (borrowing from Sellam's slightly
later mail):
I don't like the idea of storing the actual sector data as text though. A
single floppy disk could turn into a megabyte or more. I guess in this
day and age it doesn't matter much anymore but when I was growing up you
had to make every byte count, and I know more than 95% of us here can
relate to that.
The nesting tagging allows you to specify things like
RX02 floppies, where
the headers are FM but the data is MFM. It also allows you to specify
Weird. This is something new to me. But do we really need a markup
language to describe this? Instead we can add a Sector Descriptor Header
(we were heading in this direction anyway) and have a byte to describe the
sector header format and the sector data format for each sector.
different sector sizes on different tracks, or data
written in the headers
that doesn't match physical track/sector/side on the original. It also
means that if the database is lost, damaged, incomplete or otherwise
inaccesible, an archive can still be understood, and there's no chance of
inconsistency because two people tried to add new formats at about the same
time, or someone rolled their own.
I agree with that. Human readability is definitely a compelling advantage
as is the elimination of the need for a centralized database of system
descriptions.
Well, this is certainly something to consider. A hard-coded format or a
markup format?
Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger
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