>Not that type of binary. Your can't execute an OC stack anymore than, say,
>a ClarisWorks drawing. Both are binary formats, though.
Right on the spot.
>Graphics _are_ binary. Transfering them as text is a sure-fire way to
>corrupt them.
Depends. You can convert graphics to a textual representation, but it'd
burst your hard disk because you'd have to find a way to represent 32 bits
(which fit into 4 binary characters a 256 states) with I don't know how
many textual characters (which have only about 100 states). I guess it'd be
more than four times as large and equally slow.
>At which point you're probably better off with a binary format. Computers
>can deal with binary stuff better than text. No parsing and converting to
>do.
Right again. Editing files as huge as stacks will be using a text editor
will be unwieldy. You'd only have an advantage with very small stacks,
because you'd be able to create them on any text-editor, but it'd involve
lots of maths and I'm not sure anyone would use this.
I think XML is useful solely as an in-between format when converting
stacks, e.g. when importing stacks from HyperCard or SuperCard. You could
export an SC project to a text file from a SuperCard project, then you'd
copy the text file to a unix box where you'd create a new stack from this.
Although I don't know how the images would come along. Maybe as a huge
number of PNG files? Anyway, except for use as import/export format XML is
useless for the reasons Anthony mentioned.
>>Alain: Is the GUI of OpenKard currently available in
>>the form of binaries? If not, when do you believe
>>that they will be? My guess is that we are months
>>away from this time. In the meantime, and in a matter
>>of days, we could export stacks to XML and use a
>>scripting language to rapidly prototype the GUI. Only
>>the concept of the GUI, of course, not its
>>implementation.
Alain,
a User Interface is a graphical thing. I don't see how you want to use a
textual representation like XML to prototype such a UI.
Just take a couple of XCMDs and HyperCard, and create your UI prototypes
there. It'll be faster and just as effective. You could also use MetaCard
to prototype the UI, or SuperCard, or Realbasic, or whatever. Though I
think any xTalk language would be better since we'd then be able to convert
the scripts (even if by hand) while converting Basic to xTalk would be
essentially a re-write.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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