zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Jules Richardson wrote:

> 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.

Here's a probably lame idea: since Unicode characters are basically
16-bit, and since a hex-as-ascii-encoded 8-bit byte is 16-bits, would it
be reasonable to store the actual binary data as the low order byte in a
Unicode character and have the upper byte be something like 0xFF?

That being said, I still prefer the simplicity of straight-up ASCII.

> >  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...

With adequate metadata, a search engine like Google is all the indexing
you really need as it's simple, effective, and takes place without you
knowing or needing to know about it.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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