Hacker News Reader

> Very straightforward format.

The spec is 756 pages. For the 2008 spec. How is that very straightforward? My god.

Even the 2003 version clocks in at 696 pages and apparently includes "Interactive Forms", "Movies" and "Sounds".

Here's the link https://web.archive.org/web/20101214132912/http://partners.a...

How is that _straightforward_?

If you are generating documents you ignore all the stuff you don’t need. You are left with a sane dictionary based format with some optional compression. Ignore the compression until you feel the need to optimize. There is a bit of a complicated bit for random access where you need to remember and regurgitate the offset of various dictionaries. Beyond that it is just a bunch of drawing commands. Of course these are 20 year old memories and maybe the horror of part of it has burnt that from my memory.

I do agree that writing a reader would be brutal.

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