According to Paul Rohr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> 1.  File types
> --------------
> Obviously, wherever possible we want to reuse the existing file type strings 
> that everyone else uses.  Does anyone know of a publicly-available, fairly 
> current list of these?  The only thing I found was almost 5 years old.  
> 
> For formats that we invent and need to register, presumably we could just 
> use variants of the existing suffixes used on other platforms.  Thus, we'd 
> wind up with something like the following:
> 
>   importer  type    creator(s)  
>   --------  ----    ----------

Don't care about the creator. Once you have registered a file type it is
used whatever is the creator. The creator only refers to the app that
created the file.

>   .abw      ABW     ABIW
>   .doc      WDBN    MSWD, WPC2, BOBO, etc.

Word files also have WDB6 and WDB8 if I remember correclty (word 6 and 8).
WDBN if for Word 3/4/5 not supported yet.

>   .dot      sDBN    MSWD

Same. See above.

>   .rtf      RTF     ABIW, MSWD, etc.

RTF aslo uses TEXT. Yes, it is dumb. We must check a TEXT file against RTF
content recognition.


>   .txt      TEXT    ABIW, ttxt, R*ch, MSIE, MOSS, etc. 
>   .utf8     UTF8    ABIW

!!! I didn't know this existed.

>   .zabw     zABW    ABIW

Just use 'Gzip' since it is a gzip file. Perhaps we can consider both as a
valid type.

> 
>   exporter  type
>   --------  ----
[...]

>   .html     HTML
>   .rtf      RTF
>   .tex      TEX
>   .txt      TEXT

>   .utf8     UTF8
>   .zabw     zABW
> 
> Note that some of these (HTML, RTF, TEXT, UTF8, etc.) are blind guesses, and 
> need to be checked.

:-)


> 2.  Creator
> -----------
> Since using all four letters seems to be canonical practice, do we just use 
> ABIW for this? 

ABIW is currently free for use as a creator and a file type.
zABW too.
See <http://developer.apple.com/dev/cftype/>

>I'm presuming that versioning (ABW1, ABW2, etc.) isn't 
> really necessary or desirable here.  

No. I don't think unless they are radically different.

> One thing I'm not sure about, though -- when we save an edited version of a 
> file created by some other app, I'm not clear whether we should:
> 
>   - always change the creator to ABIW (since we last messed with it), or
>   - attempt to preserve the original creator

That's a policy that we should think about. But usually the later editor is
set to the owner.
BTW, there is a couple of creators that should be considered as "orphan"
because they are used as default in some case by some FTP clients,
PC/Exchange utilities, etc. This should be checked too.

> Fortunately, these questions should all be pretty easy to resolve once the 
> folks working on the Mac port get to that point.

Is there somebody on this. I'd like to help but I currently don't have the
time to get involved on the Mac version (but I can help on the UN*X version
as I use Linux and BSD as workstations at work :=))


Hub



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