Rubber Chicken Software Co. wrote:
Now, I wouldn't agree with the statement "Most native binary formats
end up "painting themselves into a corner"
Typo :)
I meant "Most NAIVE binary formats" :)
I've seen quite a few binary formats where the authors needed to tack
things on in an ungainly way... Mostly because of fixed offset based
fields, or "index" based fields where data at a certain column had a
certain meaning and there was no name associated with that column. Or
because of a lack of ability to nest extra tree data.
I haven't heard of IFF...
Of course any well written binary format is going to be extensible,
if... that is what is needed of course. Its just a lot harder to write
a good binary format than a simple one. The first kind of binary
format that comes to mind is almost certainly the wrong one :)
I mean I never invented XML... I was still doing things in a table/
column way before I heard of XML. The first thing that came to my mind
was a wrong thing...
On the other hand, I did once create a tree based binary format, in
hypercard, about 12 years ago :) So I guess the concept of trees
wasn't something I couldn't have come up with.
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