Great news.

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>That suggestion would be better made on the Hyperion AmigaOS forum than in a news item thread.

No, it wouldn't. The forum in question is only for registered OS4 users, and therefore excludes all users of OS3, MOS, AROS, Windows, etc. That's not really appropriate for a platform-independent standard. It would even exclude Electronic Arts who were the original co-developers of the standard. There's no way for me, and most others, to log in there and contribute to further development of IFF.

Last edited by Minuous on 13-May-2012 at 10:37 PM.

@Minuous

+1

btw... What about Amiga User Interface Style Guide? It will be included?

Last edited by ShInKurO on 14-May-2012 at 06:32 AM.

@Minuous

In fact it is already missing new IFF chunk types.

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@itix
Quote:

In fact it is already missing new IFF chunk types.

Use the contact form on http://www.amigaos.net to register any missing IFF chuck types.

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@Steven
Quote:

Use the contact form on http://www.amigaos.net to register any missing IFF chuck types.

You for sure know that Itix is morphos supporter for many years, and even if _we_ need something from him, its _we_ should contact with him and ask about details, and be in hope that he will give them, and not fallback him like "go and use contact form". Like he have nothing else to do, or so worry about os4 wiki :)

Last edited by kas1e on 14-May-2012 at 04:22 PM.
Last edited by kas1e on 14-May-2012 at 04:18 PM.

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@kas1e
Quote:

You for sure know that Itix is morphos supporter for many years...

The IFF specification is platform agnostic. As such, the IFF FORM registry is open to any platform. Therefore, I don't see how that is at all relevant.

Anyone that wishes to register an IFF FORM or chunk on the official registry should use the contact form as explained on the registry. Everybody is treated equally as it should be.

This registry used to be handled by Gary Peake at Amiga. James Jacobs then took it over because Amiga no longer wanted to maintain it. Now the registry is maintained on the new wiki.

Please, let's not drag politics into this.

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Quote:

May I put in a request for consideration for a minimum alteration to the IFF standard that will allow, hopefully, for current and future resistant use. The size of fields in IFF are 32 bit words, giving 4 billion, 4 Gig unsigned, +- 2 Gig signed.

Too late for that, I guess... The IFF specs were written around 1985 and draw upon earlier design ideas which came out of Xerox almost a decade earlier. As a structured, well-defined data container format it did things right when the very idea of having interchangeable data formats was not on everybody's minds. Hence the multitude of image file formats, many of them either poorly specified or "proprietary", for example, which came along in the late 1980'ies and early 1990'ies.

IFF filled a need, and its design was quite influential over the years. Microsoft copied it for its own RIFF data. Apple, SGI and others would use AIFF, for example. The design of PNG was strongly influenced by IFF.

Today the need for a common data interchange format is not as strong as it used to be more than two decades ago. We now have specialized data container formats for media (video, audio, still images) which have little in common, but whose structure and contents are well-defined and public. As for textual information, SGML- and XML-derived data formats have come into their own over the last two decades, to put it mildly.

Where does IFF fit in there? I don't quite see that it does fit in there at all. Even if you tried to extend its range across 64 bit quantities, you'd still have to make a convincing and useful application to use these capabilites. Augmenting or replacing an established structured data format is very difficult. To take an example, not even Google managed to make much of a push with WebM, and they really tried.

While it's nice to ponder how IFF could have become more useful, I believe it's long past the time when such changes could have made any impact.

Last edited by olsen on 15-May-2012 at 07:39 AM.
Last edited by olsen on 15-May-2012 at 07:38 AM.

@ssolie

Thank you.

@kas1e

It is ok. We have to keep it clean and registering chunk types also helps us to keep system polished and documented.

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