> I think perhaps a better terminology might be "ideation" and > "realization". But again, ideation has nothing to do with a file format.
No matter which word we choose, the choice of a file format highly influences the level of abstraction of the idea the file expresses. Think about a webpage. Imagine your favorite website as a single big ".GIF" image map instead of an HTML structure. Well it could work and probably even look good, but you couldn't extract some part of its text easily, you couldn't search it with one of your browser's commands, you couldn't enlarge text with automatic page reformatting without overloading the width of your screen, etc. That's because the ".gif" would describe the website at a much lower level (the pixels), or most of the "realization" would be already done if you prefer. Then (what I and many other people call) the intention is lost in favor of the extension. In this example, the "gif" file describes pixels as the "wav" file (or parts of ".mod") describes sound pressure in function of time ; while the "html" file describes the wanted quite abstract layout of the page as the "mid" file describes notes having to be played and instrument choices. -- Dominic Genest �tudiant 3e cycle D�partement d'Informatique et de G�nie Logiciel Universit� Laval 97010111
