[ImageJ-devel] Encoding 2-d plane information in a URL

[Lee Kamentsky]

Hi Curtis,
Sorry about being AWOL for the last two checkins - the last one was the 
Broad Retreat so I was away. I've been sort of roped into a standards 
committee for a file format for storing measurements (ISAC ICEFormat). 
One of the problems we're having is selecting a single plane from a TIFF 
stack or movie using a URL - you'd like to have some way to specify a 
monochrome 2-d plane (or more generally, an N-d hypercube from a stack).

I'm thinking about something like:

file:///path-to/myimage.tif?series=5&index=15 (reads a whole plane)

file:///path-to/myimage.tif?series=5&index=15&x=200&y=200&height=400&width=400 
(reads a 200x200 partial image).

Is that general enough for movie, flex, tif and other formats? Any 
precedents for this? Useful in other contexts?

Thanks,
--Lee