Preparation for CRC32 in index records - other changes required

[Rob Mueller]

> The nice thing about this is you don't even need to read the
> lengths off the front of each item before you use them, since
> we already need to do that during the initial parse.  That way
> the pointers are actually to the start of the string itself.

That sounds good to me! And if you want "raw" access, you can use the base & 
size items.

Do alignment issues matter if you're accessing struct members? I'm not sure 
what the alignment concern is?

Rob