archive file format exmaple

From: Hans Franke <Hans.Franke_at_siemens.com>
Date: Thu Aug 12 08:30:07 2004

Am 12 Aug 2004 11:50 meinte Jules Richardson:

> On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 11:11, Steve Thatcher wrote:
> > here is a "crude" example of what I was talking about.
> > [snip]
>
> That looks good.

Well, in fact it reassembles quite much something I postet some
3 years or so ago on classiccomp (I repost the original definition
in a paralell message - that was the first draft, the actual is a
bit more advanced by now, but I don't have it here at work).

I have been working on that afterwards, but as usual, there where
way moe other things to do, so it faded away a bit. Maybe I should
get finaly my ass moving and post all the stuff on the Website that
I prepared for it some years ago :)

> How's about moving things like author into the definitions section?

I think such stuff (i.e. basicly everything that is not necersarry
for a narrow minded application which works only on one system
like a reader/writer for Apple DOS 3.3 on an Apple II) should be
optional.

> I'm not so sure about having the actual data within the archive element;
> I'd rather have it afterwards.

I would prefer an aproach where both ways are possible, includeing
a third wich allows to put the data even into another file. In the
CCDD definition almost every element (except META) may be empty and
have a HREF attribute pointing to it's content:

A take header record could have it's data included:

<DATA SIZE="80" ENCODING="CHAR" FILLER=" ">HDR2U020480204841 00</DATA>

or just point to the data

<DATA HREF="#DB1"/>
<DATA SIZE="80" ENCODING="CHAR" FILLER=" " ID="DB1">HDR2U020480204841 00</DATA>

which of course may even be in another file:

<DATA HREF="http://cc-archive.org/~hans/mytapes/T43782.xml#DB1"/>

This linking structure was a side effekt from the main goal to define
a XML format, which is not only able to represent the information of
one storage media, but also a storage configuration. And for more
complex configurations it might be useful to have configuration and
media independently defined.

Some may say that configuration is not needed, but then again,
for some applications you have to have several media online
in a certain way, otherwise it won't work (e.g. a programm
disk in drive 1 and a data disk in drive 2).

Furthermore it simplifies the design (and handling) of emulators,
when one can mount a whole set of media in a specific configuration
ar once.


Gruss
H.
--
VCF Europa 6.0 am 30.April und 01.Mai 2005 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/
Received on Thu Aug 12 2004 - 08:30:07 BST

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