Richard L Walker asks:
| I'm going to hate myself for asking, but what is the difference between the
| text file and the abc file? Without really digging, they both look the
| same.
I think the idea is that there would be no difference in their
contents at all, but the different suffixes on their names would tell
the web server to send them with different types in the HTTP headers.
This "MIME type" is what browsers look at to decide how to handle an
incoming file. So a knowledgeable abc user could configure their
browser to do something special with .abc files, which would arrive
with the type "text/vnd.abc". Meanwhile, a naive user could fetch the
.txt file, which would arrive as "text/plain" and would show in the
browser's window as ordinary text without any configuring.
This isn't a bad idea at all. If the web server is on a unix-like
machine, it wouldn't even require two copies of the file, since the
single file could be linked to both names, and the only space used
would be for the second directory entry. On most other kinds of
computers, this would double the disk space used, but abc files are
small, right? (But you would have the added hassle of making sure
that all copies of a tune get updated.)
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