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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/
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