Hi, Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > But the fact is that you're going to end up having to Base64 > encode all the image data - which will blow the physical file size WAY > out of proportion. And if don't do that (ie. attempt to leave in > binary data), then you are violating the spirit of XML's design goals. That's why we dropped the idea of embedding the image data in XML. XML is very well suited to describe the structure of a multi-layered, multi-framed image/animation and it can be used perfectly to embed meta information as well as vector layers, paths and the like. XML namespaces make it easy to add application-specific extensions later. As you can see, the format I imagine here is not really GIMP specific. It could serve as a general exchange format for complex images. We discussed to bundle one XML file with a set of files that store the image data. These files would preferably be known image formats or perhaps even strict subsets of known image formats. That could be PNG for example but I'm not sure if PNG would suit our needs for higher bitdepths and the like. Most likely we will need a different format for the actual image data. I would suggest that these files are then put together in an ar archive. Such an uncompressed archive has the advantage that the XML metadata can easily be extracted. As you can see all this is very rough and not clearly layed out. It's a vague idea and it will need a lot of work to specify such a format in detail. Sven
