Frank Nordberg wrote:
>But in any case it's not as if the compressed archives saves any
>downloading time. The self-extracting hqx archive is actually
>considerably *larger* than the individual files, while the zip archive
>only saves 8%. I just thought it'd be a good idea for visitors to just
>have to click on a single link.
Both midi and pdf are quite dense formats, so you can't compress them
much more. Making a .zip or .sit file mostly has the advantage of
putting them together in one file. If you make that a self-extracting
archive it gets a bit bigger, because you have added the code to
decompress it. If you make that into .hqx it gets much bigger still,
because that's an ascii text representation and only uses seven of the
eight bits in each byte. hqx is not really needed any longer, as
things get downloaded in binary mode now.
>I can answer two of the questions that puzzled Phil, though. The midi
>files are colour coded according to nationality. I usually remove such
>labels before uploading, since they'll only appear on Macs in any case,
>but in this case I forgot.
>As for the creator code, I routinely remove those from the midi files.
>It's mostly just a habit, but also because I think Macintosh users
>should be allowed to choose the application themselves. Again this
>shouldn't make any difference whatsoever to other computers.
OK. If you want to mark a file as not belonging to any particular
program, you should set the creator to '????', as that value is
reserved by Apple for that purpose.
It sounds as if your zipped midi files were in MacBinary format.
You should be able to turn that off in your zip program (if you
use Zipit, it puts the letters 'mb' in the right-hand column of
the contents table. Click on that to turn it off.)
Phil Taylor
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