"jr" <cre### [at] gmailcom> wrote:

> - keeping "image and the code" in one place, along with the includes, bg
> image(s) etc, would be ideal.  a project oriented approach.  and zip would be a
> good format.
>
> - hate the idea/concept of "allow for editing, and re-save into the image file
> wrapper".  if anything the other way round, keep everything plain human-readable
> text and include image(s) and other binary content 'base64' encoded.
>
> anyway, thanks, have a clearer picture now of the "silly idea".

I'm not sure I care too much exactly how it gets implemented.  I was under the
impression that opening such an image file with a hex editor would result in the
text part looking like --- plain text.  It's not like plain text is "special" -
it all has to get displayed on the screen by something that interprets the ASCII
values anyway.   At least that's the way it works in my head.

What about:
http://textbundle.org/
https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2014/11/the-textbundle-format/

I posted about this idea a while back - there was some other file format that
sort of acted like concatenated text files....   maybe it was a 'nix format...
I can't remember.


> > It might also be possible to implement security by obscurity, to protect certain
> > parts of code that an author might not want users casually messing with.  If you
> > really wanted to edit that code, you'd have to work for it, rather than just
> > "Ooops!  I broke it!"
>
> also not keen on this.  if an author feels .. so strongly, well, then don't
> publish.  simples.

Right, but the idea is just to make the code available and usable, but not right
there in the editor where it can easily be inadvertently corrupted.  I often
write spreadsheets with "locked" cells - but the password is sitting right there
in a documentation tab in case someone wants to edit it in the future.   But in
daily use, they can't get messed up by accident, which is easy to do.

I would like a project-oriented format/editor.  Open the project, and the main
file is in the first tab (Maybe the second, if there's a documentation tab) and
the includes and image files are available in other tabs.
OpenOffice allows use of hyperlinks in the spreadsheet, which I've used to
navigate around a sheet or between tabs.  It would be cool to specify image
filenames, and be able to click on those and get a preview, then "go back" and
edit the SDL.  Working on some code and need to find out what some value an
Lvalue has?   Click it and you jump back to the last #declare for that Lvalue.

But I think just starting off with the basic bundle idea would solve a lot of
organizational and archival issues.

> > But binary copy, hexdump, Tcp, and other tools might provide a sort of
> > functional work-around / proof of concept to see how a suite of files could
> > potentially be used ....
>
> why binary anyway?  what's wrong with a plain text (or utf8) encoding?

How do you keep the different text/SDL files separate, and maybe even package
images for mapping together?   Isn't a zip a binary format?

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