the emails I received seem to be out of order... I believe what you are saying does satisfy the requirement that I have been proposing. There are different levels of physical to data mapping. I can see target platform code running that creates an image file and might actually send the XML directly out a serial port in zmodem for example. It could send it out as files or strictly embedded data. My point has been to make the file blocks available if the target has them just so the data can be extracted easily. best regards, Steve Original Message: ----------------- From: Vintage Computer Festival vcf(a)siconic.com Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:39:18 -0700 (PDT) To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: RE: Let's develop an open-source media archive standard On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Steve Thatcher wrote: I see what you're saying now. I suppose another potential format that can be incorporated into the spec is a file-based format, where blocks or "files" are represented inside the archive. I can see this being useful for two purposes: 1) Imaging the filesystem from a medium (as opposed to the medium itself) 2) Incorporating code along the lines of what Dwight has been suggesting that knows how to do special processing of the image it is contained in. The code can be extracted and poked into memory using a very simple algorithm that possibly can be described in comments in the image file. I did suggest that the spec be able to image filesystems in a previous message. I think this comes close enough to what you are describing. It can be modified to also be able to indicate "blocks of data". These blocks could be given an identifier--a name, number, whatever; it doesn't matter, as long as it's an ASCII-representable string--and then extracted Does this satisfy you, Steve? :) -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ] -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .