On 08-Mar-2013 10:15, John Cliff wrote:
Computers. to copy (a file) from RAM onto a disk or other storage medium.
The file in memory is always a SVG, so you cant save as anything else...
No, you can "save" into any format that retains the meaning of the data structures in memory. By the strict logic you are espousing the only way to "save" a binary memory structure would be via a binary dump to a file. That is rarely how it is done. Instead the data ends up in some other equivalent format, including especially ones that have been converted to text forms so that people can read them. Remember CGM? That had 3 formats (one in text) - all represented the same thing, but typically none of them corresponded to the internal representation of the diagram in the program.
like I said, I believe its wrong that we claim to open anything other than SVG, we dont, we import/translate them into an svg with varying levels of success. likewise, we can only save an svg, anything else is an export with a varying level of compatability.
I get the impression some of you have not spent a lot of time actually dealing one one one, face to face, with "typical" end users, by which I mean, people who have zero interest in touching the code of the programs they are using. These end users simply do not care about the fine points many of you find so compelling, but they do want "Save as" to let them put their data on disk in the form that they want it to be. The people I deal with are very high end (look where I am) and but not once in the ~30 years I have been here has an end user complained to me that the "Save as..." in a program was unsafe because it let them choose a nonconservative file format!
Remember KISS? TSM's Open, Save, Save as... is KISS. (And some programs dispense with "Save as..." as well, using Save to mean both things.) Open + Import, Save + Save as.. + Export is not KISS. For TSM all an end user has to know is that they want to open or save a file. For SUM they have to know which file formats are conservative and which are not, and they have to know this before they select one of those file menu options. So I repeat for the umpteenth time, SUM is not actually going to benefit any of the real end users, but it is going to inconvenience many of them. If the goal is really to protect end users from themselves then automatic backups is a far better option.
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech