Journal AKAImBatman's Journal: The Intelligent File Format 9
Today's systems have hundreds of file formats they must support. Wouldn't it be great if we could reduce all the file formats in existence down to a single file format that could be supported across all systems?
My latest three-part article addresses this concept: The Intelligent File Format
If such a concept could be made into a standard, pressure could be put onto Microsoft and other large companies to support the format or lose massive government business. (See the recent pushes for the Open Document Format for a very real example of how this can work.)
I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions.
Image File Format (Score:2)
Re:Image File Format (Score:2)
Too bad I'd written nearly the entire article by the time I realized the similarities in both name and function. Oh well.
So... (Score:2)
Re:So... (Score:2)
moof (Score:1)
Say every driver that wrapped a file format had to support the following interface:
InformationType
A video file's driver would return the GUID for TYPE_VIDEO.
Then you'd know you could successfully call:
IVideo
IFrameIterator IVideo::getFrameIterator()
Re:moof (Score:2)
The key is that a spreadsheet knows what spreadsheet information is and really only needs access to it. Similarly, a video player only needs the next frame of animation. It doesn't care about how it's compressed or how it's stored. With some types of files (e.g. Images), returning the standard Java object would pretty much make all the interfaces 100% compatible with each other. The more complex situations (such as spreadsheets with different features) would merely require that
Re:moof (Score:1)
Re:moof (Score:2)
Re:moof (Score:1)