[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [ProgSoc] jpg file
On Mon, Mar 16 1998, Christian Kent wrote:
|
| What gets me is how PC users and Unix users on the internet all use
| sensible 8-bit encoding and compression schemes, yet more often than not,
| Mac users distribute their programs and data via hqx, even when the
| distribution is via FTP and HTTP! This is just a waste of time and
| bandwidth.
I agree. The only two combinations that make sense to me for FTP/HTTP
sites are .sit and .sea.bin (the latter needs to be in MacBinary format
so it can self-execute), while the most common format I see on Mac sites
is .sit.hqx and .sea.hqx, which is plain silly.
IMHO formats like UUENCODE and BinHex should be reserved exclusively for
the purposes for which they were intended: transporting non-ASCII files
over E-mail.
As an aside, I don't recommend the use of UUENCODE anymore, ever since I
tried copying a UUENCODEd file from a message in a Web mailing list
archive, only to find that the archive had stripped the trailing spaces
off the file, so I had to put them back in manually before decoding
would work. MIME's base64 encoding doesn't use the space character,
which makes MIME safer for transporting files over E-mail.
|
| Mac users must be the only ones who have to put up with double-encoded
| files so often, e.g. ".sit.hqx", ".sit.bin" and even ".bin.hqx". There's
Err, isn't ".tar.gz" a double-encoded format? Admittedly its
double-encoded for different reasons, but it goes to show that there can
sometimes be good reasons for layering encodings over each other.
Redundant and otherwise useless layerings is a different matter :-)
| > use BinHex sometimes tho as I can't split large binary files to fit on
| > floppies and re-merge them (easily) on a Mac.
|
| Ahem, why are you using floppies pray tell? :)
Because my Mac is an LC III with 8Mb RAM running System 7.1, and I was
downloading Mac stuff onto Zip disks at work and taking them home.
I need MacOS 7.5+ to read MS-DOS Zip disks, so I had to use my PC to
write the files to floppies and read them in that way.
I found a way to write multi-floppy archives without messing with
BinHex, which is to write to the floppies in raw GNU tar format, and use
a freeware Mac program called "suntar". Now this would be the perfect
format for me, if only I could find a Win95 program that could read and
write raw GNU tar floppies... if anyone knows of one, please let me
know.
Cheers,
--
Dennis Clark dbugger@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au PGP/MIME spoken here
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/* we have tried to make this normal case as abnormal as possible */
--Larry Wall in cmd.c from the perl source code
--
You are subscribed to the progsoc mailing list. To unsubscribe, send a
message containing "unsubscribe" to progsoc-request@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au.
If you are having trouble, ask owner-progsoc@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au for help.
This list is archived at <http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/lists/progsoc/>