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Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:46:05 -0400
From: Gary McGath <gary@hulmail.harvard.edu>
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To: Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam@pobox.com>, tiff@lists.maptools.org
Subject: Re: [Tiff] eta for bigtiff support?
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Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Gary McGath wrote:

>> There's a reason for the lack of feedback. The documentation at 
>> http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/bigtiff.html says:
>> 
>>> This is a proposal, not a specification. Don't go implementing it just 
>>  >yet and releasing your code to the public, it has not yet been approved
>>  >and is liable to change. You don't want to be the one whose files turn
>>  >out invalid in 6 months from now.
>> 
>> It shouldn't be surprising that people aren't jumping in to test when 
>> the definition of BigTIFF is still in flux, and has shown no sign of 
>> approaching a stable specification.
> 
> Gary,
> 
> The specification is not in flux - however, clearly some of the documentation
> and web site materials have not been kept up to date and are off-putting to
> adoption.
> 
> Joris - can you address some of this?

Yes, please. Approval by a major standards body or by Adobe would be 
very nice, but what's vital is public information that's available for 
reference. For instance, when the Global Digital Format Registry goes 
public, we're going to want to point to a document somewhere that says, 
"This is what the format is." If the documentation says it's only a 
draft and that no one should rely on its stability, people will take it 
at its word and avoid any serious use of the format.

-- 
Gary McGath
Digital Library Software Engineer
Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems
http://hul.harvard.edu/~gary/index.html

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