[fitsbits] start of Public Comment Period on compressed FITS image and tables

[Erik Bray]

On 06/24/2015 10:16 AM, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
> (well javascript is not a serious language really suited to deal with binary
> data, is it ?)

Let's please refrain from value judgements about individual programming 
languages and/or communities.  Also JavaScript has had machine int and 
float-typed arrays for some time now [1].  Furthermore, an important aspect of 
the tiled compression scheme is the *tiles*.  Ignoring the fact that JavaScript 
is no longer strictly for web-browsers, when it comes to web-based image viewers 
sending sections of images across the wire as individual tiles is a commonplace 
approach (usually in combination with having multiple versions of the same file 
at different scales).  So even if a pure JavaScript implementation of, say, RICE 
were just too slow, a web-based FITS viewer could still send requests for tile 
decompression to a server-side component.  Of course, that wouldn't help for a 
100% browser-side viewer, but I don't think even that would be impossible.  I 
think it should be tried if it hasn't been already.

In any case, I don't think this is an argument against including the tile 
compression specification in the standard.

Erik

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Typed_arrays