Defining Disk Image Dump Standard (ACHTUNG very long!) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

5 Jun 2000

On Jun 5, 20:55, Hans Franke wrote:

...
  Well, back to our theme:
 Pete, I realy agree to your idea about a sensible editor, just
 we are living in a real world, where real software is to be used.
 And since this is supposed to be an open standard, a sensible
 editior can't be assumed... Even if we would try, I doubt that
 such a thing is available on every obscure home computer system.
 Even chances for a simple text editor can be bad. So including
 binary as default is a bad idea 
:-)  I only included it because there appeared to some strong opposition to
"wasted" bytes.  What I did was bolt tags onto the binary, deliberately
producing what Tony accurately described as the worst of both worlds.
 Actually, if you look at the examples, the ASCII form in the tags, at
least, typically takes just about the same space as the binary would, so
there's absolutely no reason to use anything but ASCII.

...
  - I would even go further and
 restrict all markup specific parts for only using the characters
 A-Z, 0-9 and some well defined (read only the absolute necersary
 minimum) characters. 
Thereby avoiding 99.9% of the problems raised by incompatible character set
representations.  Agreed.

...
  Let'S just assume we would need three times - oh,
well lets
 say four times the space to encode so an Apple Disk will
 need a whooping 600 kb 
That's only a thousand on a CD  ;-)

-- 

Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York