Name: rlT66838 Date: 09/02/97


There isn't a standard way to teach the system
about new image formats. The 'natural' way of
doing so would be to define an 'imageFormat'
interface, which would have a 'getImage' method
accepting a URL. If the URL is recognized by the
imageFormat (by using the file prefix or any other
criteria), it would return an Image object;
otherwise null. given a registerImageFormat
method, getImage could just loop on the available
formats and return the first one which claims the
URL.

Variants would be to allow the imageFormat to
examine the first few bytes of the file; or,
alternatively, have each imageFormat provide a
getFilePrefix method and have getImage use this
exclusively to decide which imageFormat to use.

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