Designing File Formats
General Tips
- Clearly document the format spec so others’ can easily adopt it
- Define core features that all applications MUST implement
- Define extra features that some applications MAY implement
- Define how to handle common parsing errors or corruption
- Release a reference parser implementation, or suggest a method for parsing the format
- Consider adding features to allow applications to parse the file even if they may not understand all of the data
Text Formats
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Binary Formats
- Include metadata to make file traversal easier
- Record section locations at the beginning of the file
- Record section lengths at the beginning each section