Hi, "William Skaggs" <weskaggs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> ASCII isn't a reasonable encoding for names. I strongly hope the >> EXIF spec doesn't define this as ASCII. > > The spec defines it as ASCII. Before you get too outraged, please > bear in mind that the EXIF spec was created in Japan, where they > were certainly aware of the significance of what they were doing. > (It was, however, derived from the TIFF spec for the fields that the > two share, and that is probably the source of the ASCII > specification.) If the spec says it's ASCII, then we have no choice but keeping it ASCII. That of course means that there isn't much point in allowing anyone to edit this field since conversion to ASCII will fail for almost all strings that a user may enter. It appears that the best we can do about strings in EXIF data is not to touch them. >> We also have a more or less complete metadata editor that waits to be >> committed to CVS. I don't understand why you are ignoring the work of >> Raphael. IMO you two should work closely together instead of >> duplicating each other's work. > > I agree! I am not at all ignoring Raphael's work -- if it was > accessible, I would be interfacing with it instead of using > temporary hacks. But isn't it accessible from http://wilber.gimp.org/~raphael/metadata/ ? > This statement gives the essence of what has been holding us back. > "It might turn out . . ." means that there is no concrete sense of > what is needed. But how can an API be carefully designed without > a concrete sense of what is needed? It isn't possible. The only > way to get anywhere is to experiment, and when something doesn't > work, change it. It's not like we're working with core code here > that will break GIMP if it's imperfect. Well, another way is to make a list of what we need and design an API. I don't think a lot of experiments are needed to get a first design proposal written down. Sven
