Re: Binary standards for images and sounds

[Philip Brown <philb@soda.berkeley.edu>]

>>>>[From Carl Edman]
    
    >From Mark Wedel <master@rahul.net>:
    > This is not a direct reply to the image format posted by Carl, but a
    > few notes.
    
    Well, that is well met because this not a direct reply to your  
    proposal.  Rather I'd to express the opinion that Xpm seems to be a  
    very unsuited format for general distribution.  While it does look  
    clever and cute it seems to be very far from being compact.  That may  
    be a forgiveable failing, but it also looks like a pretty heavy format  
    to interpret properly in all cases.  Clients would have to write tons  
    of code to handle it well.     And before someone suggests libXpm, using  
    it would foreclose the opportunity to run clients on anything but X  
    systems which I thought was one of the main reasons for the switch to  
    client/server. 
    
The code for Xpm is public! it's not like it's a commercial library...
the souce is all open!!! Porters would just hav to replace a few X calls
with their own windowing software stuff.
I don't think there are actually that many X calls in the library!

It's not supposed to be "compact". It's supposed to be "thorough". And
it's pretty good in that respect. And to the point, it's better than any
other format.
It's built for the purpose of taking color pixmap data, and making it fit
onto just about any color hardware setup. That is, after all, what we
want.