Asset Wrapper

Reference	extension	id	mime type	LSL
Asset Wrapper	asset	unassigned	application/vnd.ll.asset

Requirements

A simple container format has been invented to wrap assets in a somewhat flexible and concise manner. Specifically we needed a format which:

• provides features for attribution.
• the meta-data needs to be in the first network packet. (specifically a requirement of texture attribution)
• supports arbitrary meta-data.
• introduces minimal byte overhead and does not require increased payload size.

Other container formats were considered but rejected for one of:

• too much overhead
• poor cross-language and cross-platform support
• geared for streaming content rather than fixed assets.

Specification

The asset type is an LLSD array of arrays. Each sub-array will contain a LLSD map of meta-data followed by the data segment. Asset files are serialized in binary LLSD unless a header in asset file indicates otherwise.

The asset file:

• must be an array of arrays.
• should be binary
• may not have a header to indicate binary serialization
• must indicate if they are not serialized in the binary format in the first line of the file.
• should not contain more than one segment of a particular content-type.

The meta-data segment:

• must contain the 'content-type' of the data.
• should contain a 'creation-date' of the data.
• should not contain a 'content-length'.

This is a notation based mock-up of what an asset will actually look like:

[[{'content-type':'image/x-j2c', 
   'creation-date':'2007-01-01T00:01:00Z', 
   'creator-id':u3c115e51-04f4-523c-9fa6-98aff1034730}, 
 <BINARY IMAGE DATA>]]