Manish Singh wrote:
On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 12:06:12PM -0400, Christopher Curtis wrote:Rule #1 in brainstorming: don't criticise any idea, no matter how silly.
So much for rules...
Another downside: needing a special tool to manipulate it.
Well, now, I want to end this silliness right here. Here's what you need to manipulate files in my propsed format: (cat and dd), or (vi), or (type and wordpad). There are no tools more standard than these.
Consider the case of a corrupted xcf file. Maybe only 1 layer out of 20 is corrupted. With this proposal, a user needs either a special tool to extract out the good layers, or do a lot of work by hand to figure out how to use dd to grab it.
With this format, a tool like the gimp can say "layer X is corrupt" and the user would have to do something crazy like edit the file with "vi" and delete the ``<layer type="corrupt"> ... </layer>'' section from the XML header.
With say ar, the user can extract individual layers by some tag, referenced in the xml metadata. Then can edit the xml to stub out the broken layer, and repack it and have a valid xcf file. This could be the difference between losing 10% of the work vs. all of it.
Ahh yes, this way all the user has to do is:
ar x file
look for the right xml and edit it out or something based on some tag (I'm so glad this is so well thought out...)
ar a file everythingelse1,2,3
Won't the Windows people be happy that they can do this instead of just opening a friggin binary-safe text editor.
So while a user can open a text file header in an editor, they are going to need a tool anyway to manipulate it effectively.
Yeah - it's called the same text editor.
That's the advantage of using a standard format. Using standard tools to manipulate it. More likelihood of a machine having a tool installed, and less work for the GIMP team in maintaining special tools.
<tap><tap><tap> ... is this thing on?
You're right about simplicity though
-Yosh
