On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Sven Panne wrote: > I don't have any Haskell lib for (R)IFF, but as one of the freealut authors I > have the "pleasure" to maintain a WAV reader, among other things. IMHO WAV is > one of the most idiotic, redundant and underspecified format in the world, > and most existing WAV files are broken in some respect. PNGs are a bit > better, but all those chunked formats are a bit problematic in practice, > because new chunk types are constantly being invented, contradict other > chunks, etc. etc.
The idea is that unknown chunks can be ignored in most cases. Of course, this is not always possible, but there are several examples where it worked. > Quite a few concrete (R)IFF instances can contain (R)IFF within chunks > themselves, furthermore you have always be prepared to handle an unknown > chunk type. So a general (R)IFF type can't be much more than a tree with a > tagged bunch of bytes at each node, which is not really of much help IMHO. That's exactly what I ask for. Some of the features of the IFF like CAT and PROP chunks are rarely used, maybe because there were no libraries which support them. > Separate libraries for handling WAV, TIFF, PNG, AVI, etc. might make more > sense, as they can reflect the underlying structure much better. But they could all use a general IFF library. This way you can bundle different kinds of data in one file, say sounds and pictures for an animation. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
