[Warning, Will Robinson!  Danger!  Even further off-topic rambles
 are headed this way.  Take shelter.  Warning!]

On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 11:52:46AM +0300, Staffan Thom?n wrote:
 [...]
> And there also are file formats that don't fit in this category.. Alias (a.k.a
> Alias|Wavefront n.k.a (again) Alias) have something they call IFF too, which
> is a multiple channel high-resolution but no compression (AFAIK) format.

I believe MS produced something called RIFF.  From what I gathered,
it was a little-endian version of IFF (Reversed IFF?).  They might
have also relaxed the data alignment requirements.


> IFF for the amiga was, again as my selective memory tells, merely a container
> format for ILBM images, animations and even sounds?

It was described as a syntax for formats, in one place.  8SVX were
8-bit sound samples, ANIM were animations, etc.  There were 3 top
IFF types: FORMs were just one data object; LISTs and CATs were
both ways to put multiple FORMs together, but items in LISTs could
share information; CATs were just catenations that shared nothing
and may be unrelated.  CATs and LISTs could also contain CATs and
LISTs for nested structure.

An image was a FORM ILBM, then.  Someone pointed out that what was
done as a FORM ANIM should really have been a LIST of ILBMs (or
delta-compressed bitmaps of some sort), with shared CMAP (color
map), CAMG (Commodore-Amiga specific display type info), and BMHD
(bitmap header---size, depth, etc.) chunks.

I've got the original 1985 EA IFF specs.  (Electronic Arts created
IFF.) The files were freely distributed, as I recall.  I considered
offering up a pkgsrc "iffdoc" package, since a few programs in
pkgsrc support IFF.  It might help if future maint. work is required
on the IFF support.  I have the later IFF specs/examples, too, that
were given to the Fish Disk collection, I think.  (Those later examles
tended to require the Amiga iffparse.library support, but there may
have been some new form or chunk types too.)


> Another point that popped up.. it would stand to reason that this gif was
> intended to web-use, in which several of the mentioned formats aren't too
> practical ;-)

Oh, I dunno.  I had some ILBMs on an early web-page.  I figured
that it wasn't my fault that everyone else was using Netscape or
such.  (^&


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/