Hacker News does everything it is supposed to according to the CSS standard to indicate to your browser that the area is scrollable. In fact, it is obvious that the site is doing enough because the browser does in fact render the area as scrollable. The fact that your browser doesn't do anything to visually indicate when a region is an independent scrollable area is entirely Apple's fault . You can argue that website…
Huh. So do we build sites for users or to satisfy specs?
Do "we" make browsers to be usable, or to be pretty? If any random hack came up with that idea, it would be a random, hackish idea. But because it's Apple we have to abide? I dare say nahhhh...
TIFF, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format has been around since 1993. It supports layers. It supports compression. It supports paged(!) images. It has well-defined supported image encoding formats. It's already supported by all the image editing software you've ever used (from this millennia). We have a Standard Layered Image Format. HURRAY. NEXT PROBLEM, PLEASE.
Fun fact: Even though Adobe sits on the TIFF standard for more than 20 years, Photoshop doesn't support layered TIFF images.
FXG could have solved the single file problem by grouping all the files up and making a zip file, and picking a different extension. For example this is how Android (.apk) and iOS (.ipa) applications are distributed. It also has the advantage that if you extract the zip you can now access whatever pieces are inside as separate files even by tools that don't understand the containing format. (eg a bunch of jpg/png ins…
Also done with CBR / CBZ files (comic book archives) -- basically a renamed .zip of images with filenames numbered in ascending order.
The file extension actually makes a difference here, CBRs are RAR compressed archives.
FXG could have solved the single file problem by grouping all the files up and making a zip file, and picking a different extension. For example this is how Android (.apk) and iOS (.ipa) applications are distributed. It also has the advantage that if you extract the zip you can now access whatever pieces are inside as separate files even by tools that don't understand the containing format. (eg a bunch of jpg/png ins…
Does the zip format let you replace an arbitrary file inside an archive without rewriting the whole file? It's not uncommon to see Photoshop files that are 400+ MB, and rewriting the whole file on save would have some pretty poor performance. The other examples of files that use the zip approach are either distribution-only (ipa/apk/jar) or generally don't get very big (word processing).
This is an interesting problem, I wonder if Photoshop or The Gimp actually do something fancy here.
There shouldn't be much of a problem replacing files when the files never get bigger and uncompressed ZIPs are used (compressed would make any sense for PNGs and JPGs anyway).
Small variations in file size could be compensated with some kind of padding, but it seems to me that we are approaching a point of complexity here, where we should just use another kind of filesystem, one that supports fragmented data.
> Last summer, Adobe killed their image exchange format "FXG". Edit: previously I had balked at this claim, but I'm wrong. While I can't find any official notice of its death, and it's still in use in Scene7 and somewhat supported in the open-sourced version of Flex, trawling message boards does indicate Adobe shying away from it in favor of SVG[1][2] and it's not supported in CS6 without an extension. Still, his pro…
We also don't typically use HTML as an interchange format between editors.
Well ePub is a zip file of HTML documents. So some people do.
TIFF, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format has been around since 1993. It supports layers. It supports compression. It supports paged(!) images. It has well-defined supported image encoding formats. It's already supported by all the image editing software you've ever used (from this millennia). We have a Standard Layered Image Format. HURRAY. NEXT PROBLEM, PLEASE.
Image formats have come a long way. I think the author wants an image format that can replace .psd in a sensible way. TIFF sadly cannot do that. While it can contain layered raster data, it lacks a lot of other capabilities. The author explicitly mentions vector layers, but if you want parity with .PSD you're looking at also having to support adjustment layers (hue/curves/levels/etc), blending modes, opacity/fill, raster masks, clipping masks, vector masks, locks, annotations, guides, grids, gradients, tags, text, comps, channels, and countless other things I can't even think to list (I wont even dive into smart objects). Keep in mind that's just the layer data, there's tons of other metadata in the format as well. It is a behemoth of a file format, and the years of backwards compatibility inside of it have multiplied that complexity to levels of insanity. I have .psd files that if I enable backwards compatibility when saving will increase the file size by half a gig. Granted those are enormous source files to begin with, but with higher def screens on the horizon file sizes are increasing dramatically. Having something more sensible than .PSD is something we're going to have to deal with sooner or later.
FXG could have solved the single file problem by grouping all the files up and making a zip file, and picking a different extension. For example this is how Android (.apk) and iOS (.ipa) applications are distributed. It also has the advantage that if you extract the zip you can now access whatever pieces are inside as separate files even by tools that don't understand the containing format. (eg a bunch of jpg/png ins…
Does the zip format let you replace an arbitrary file inside an archive without rewriting the whole file? It's not uncommon to see Photoshop files that are 400+ MB, and rewriting the whole file on save would have some pretty poor performance. The other examples of files that use the zip approach are either distribution-only (ipa/apk/jar) or generally don't get very big (word processing).
You can easily add new files at the end, then rewrite the central directory header (which is at the end of the file for exactly this kind of reason: not have to rewrite everything to add new files). And because the CDH specifies offsets to files, you can replace the old entry and put the new one there (replace old offset by new offset, done). This does however mean the old entry will still be in the file until you "garbage collect". That's if the new version of the file is bigger than the old one of course, if it's smaller or the same size you can just overwrite the old entry and not touch anything.
One could even imagine padding files in the archive so there's some leeway in growing the compressed files, it'd likely depend on the format expression.
> Last summer, Adobe killed their image exchange format "FXG". Edit: previously I had balked at this claim, but I'm wrong. While I can't find any official notice of its death, and it's still in use in Scene7 and somewhat supported in the open-sourced version of Flex, trawling message boards does indicate Adobe shying away from it in favor of SVG[1][2] and it's not supported in CS6 without an extension. Still, his pro…
"We don't complain that HTML is broken because it links to images instead of including them, do we?"
Actually, we do.
Saving a webpage and getting tons of file is a nightmare while the IE approach of lumping them all together is just so sensible it's hard to imagine a universe where this isn't standard.
Replacing resources is the special case. Sharing, moving or just storing an image isn't. Just get or write a tool that can replace the resources for you and you have completely satisfied the 0.001% as well.
Whats wrong with SVG? Doesn't it accomplish what the OP wants to do already and is already a standard supported by a lot of applications? I must be missing something here
XML is a really bad format for containing large chunks of binary data (bitmap)
The XML can store references to the binary chunks in standard formats though, alongside the vector shapes and filters.
All that's left is to standardize a way to package it.