Data properties specify attributes for following (non-property) chunk. a data property essentially says "identifier = value", for example "XY = (10, 200)", telling something about following chunks. Properties may only appear inside data sections ("form" chunks, cf. data sections) and property sections ("prop" chunks, cf. group prop). The form of a data property is a type of chunk. the ckid is a property name as well as a property type. The ckSize should be small since data properties are intended to be accumulated in RAM when reading a file. (256 bytes is a reasonable upper bound.) Syntactically: Property ::= Chunk When designing a data object, use properties to describe context information like the size of an image, even if they don't vary in your program. Other programs will need this information. Think of property settings as assignments to variables in a programming language. Multiple assignments are redundant and local assignments temporarily override global assignments. The order of assignments doesn't matter as long as they precede the affected chunk. (cf. lists, cats, and Shared Properties.) Each object type (form type) is a local name space for property ids. Think of a "cmap" property in a "form ilbm" as the qualified id "ILBM.cmap". a "cmap" inside some other type of form may not have the same meaning. Property IDs specified when an object type is designed (and therefore known to all clients) are called "standard" while specialized ones added later are "nonstandard".