Re: [dev] Looking for simple, alpha supporting image format

From: Weldon Goree <weldon_AT_langurwallah.org>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 17:43:43 +0530

(Sorry, Norman, you'll get this twice. One day I'll get "reply list"
down...)

On 07/17/2014 03:39 PM, Norman Köhring wrote:
> What about Meta-Data? Like with audio files, meta data can be very useful to
> have. I have two proposals for this:
>

Why add metadata capability to a format whose expressed design goal was
simplicity? Metadata means that

1. The parser needs to be smarter than it otherwise would have to be
2. Functionally identical images would hash differently
3. More memory than necessary has to be allocated (you're going to just
load the whole file into memory, anyways 90% of the time)
4. The Huffman tree will probably get more complex (since the image
format Huffman alphabet and the metadata Huffman alphabet will likely be
different), so compression will be hurt. Don't add entropy domains you
don't have to.
5. (This is just my opinion, but...) "metadata" is a broken concept to
begin with. If information is important enough to be part of a file, it
should be part of that file's format.

Weldon
Received on Thu Jul 17 2014 - 14:13:43 CEST