On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 21:22, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
>
> > I'd strongly recommend doing exactly that. Keep the data seperate from
> > the metadata describing it. Mixing the two really detracts from the
> > human readability aspect for starters - browsing a file with nicely
> > formatted structured data peppered with streams of encoded media data
> > (whether hex pairs, base64 or whatever) would give me a headache :-)
>
> Are you really going to be spending much time rummaging through image
> files, as a hobby or something?
Nope, just thinking of the fact that this is designed to be as
human-readable as possible. Future archivists *are* likely to be
rummaging through archive files. Embedding encoded data within the
metadata information detracts from that quite severely, as well as
forcing the encoded data to be in a form such that it *can* be embedded
within whatever markup language is used.
On readability and flexibility grounds it seems sensible to move the
data outside of the metadata area (e.g. in Steve's example, outside of
the <archive></archive> tags). Note that doing that doesn't mean that
the data can't be defined using the same markup langauge used for the
metadata information; in fact in most scenarios this would likely still
be the case.
Apologies for the cc - I expect many of us interested in this will take
a few more hourse before they're subscribed to the new list.
cheers,
Jules
Received on Fri Aug 13 2004 - 07:13:39 BST