Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt From: doug-merritt@cup.portal.com Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: TIFF, IFF whats the DIFF? Message-ID: <5161@cup.portal.com> Date: 6 May 88 23:02:04 GMT References: <265@sagpd1.UUCP> Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 23 XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.4407 There is no relation whatsoever between IFF and TIFF. The authors of the article in question on TIFF made some very provocative comments about TIFF being *THE* standard, and implied that anyone who did not support it is hopelessly behind the times and probably no fun to invite to parties. This is basically a bunch of BS; they are trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by making these statements. They let slip elsewhere in the article that there's actually only a few companies/products currently supporting it, but that Real Soon Now everyone will. There is no single standard, although there are a whole bunch of different proposed standards. One thing I *particularly* dislike about the TIFF standard is that there's no magic number to identify them as such, unlike IFF. By this late point in history, I'd say there's good reason to think that any binary file format that is not self-identifying is very likely to be hopelessly brain damaged in other ways, too. Doug Doug Merritt ucbvax!sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt or ucbvax!eris!doug (doug@eris.berkeley.edu) or ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug