I haven't objected since I felt that the basic points had not been made explicitly enough. Similarly the undesirability of a two file system was just accepted by everyone, including David, without explicit discussion as to why it was dangerous, prone to error, etc. Now various examples and different members views have been given.
Images are large and efficiency is important.
A separate True-CIF header and binary file pair format is considered undesirable since this is highly prone to inconsistent file pointers, and can allow the image header to be separated from the binary data which is being described. For experiments using area-detectors this would be the first stage in the data reduction path. This will be easiest if the definitions, data names, etc. are the same. I would like CBF to be considered in the same way as other CIF's. This would seem to me to be the safest manner in which to avoid diverging formats.