zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Jules Richardson]

On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 10:09 -0700, Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
>  I'm debating even keeping things in ASCII for long term. Binary
> is close to the original but lacks the ability to add format type
> information. I still like to keep it human readable in something
> like ASCII. ASCII has a relatively long history in the computer
> industry. 

Well something like XML supports different character encodings and so
should take care of that aspect. 

I still don't like munging native binary data into some other format
though for the sake of preservation; I'd rather treat that as binary and
provide metadata / indexing alongside it, or in a seperate section or
whatever.

>  In any case, these are all academic in comparison to the problems
> of indexing. I don't even have the beginings of how to deal
> with that problem.

Well, I don't think anyone's really thought about it yet - but including
as much info as possible in the metadata for a particular archive at
least gives some confidence that it *can* be indexed...

cheers

Jules