<html><head></head><body name="Mail Message Editor"><div><br></div><div>I advise revising that expectation. There is no such standard or convention in the broader context of computer science. Indeed, the Shapefile specification, for an example directly relevant to this list, even mixes big- and little endian byte sex within the format. Graphic image formats such as TIFF allow the TIFF writer to specify which endian. Many other binary formats are exclusively little endian because of their development and propagation on the i86 platform.</div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div>— daan Strebe</div><div><br></div><br>On Jul 4, 2009, at 4:27:25 PM, "Christopher Hunt" <huntc@mac.com> wrote:<br><blockquote style="padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px; border-left-width: 2px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: blue; color: blue; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 11px; ">Hi there,<br><br>I do not claim to fully understand the context of the issue here, but<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>as a software developer I have an expectation for portable binary data<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>to be presented in big endian form. My expectation is derived from the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>big endian nature of data in binary network protocols (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endian#Endianness_in_networking<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>).<br><br>Kind regards,<br>Christopher</span></span></blockquote><br><div><br></div><div class="aol_ad_footer" id="uEBB123D63AE044D89BA9DD45684FE8AF"></div></body></html>