On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 10:42:13AM -0500, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Binary file formats are *broken*
Hence the failure of
TCP
IP
GIF
PNG
JPEG
MPEG 3 (mp3)
OGG
ZIP
gzip
PPP
PDF
EXE
etc etc :-)
> Introducing @ and $ and other currently unreserved punctuation
> characters as new reserved symbols is *broken*
Hence the failure of email?
What's broken is using closed (trade-secret) formats. There are lots
of uses for non-textual formats. And yes, making inspection easy is
very helpful for wide adoption, and one way to do that is to use a
format for which most people alerady have inspection tools, such as
when we choose a format that uses a sequence of numbers to represent
characters and text. But even a "plain US ASCII text file" is in fact
in a binary format.
Liam
--
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
