Thinking about the metadatas and the problem it is to keep track of them (when moving your data on different OS, filesystem, etc.) I think it should be mandatory for étoilé applications to have a metadata "space" in their documents -- will be a lot easier that way :-D
Are our documents going to be bundles? If so, then we can put the metadata in the info.plist or we could have a metadata.xml or whatever within the bundle and always search that file (as well as the contents of the document itself, if it contains text) when doing a search. I realize this doesn't work for files we want to be cross platform (PDFs, JPGs, DOCs, etc), unless we're providing some kind of bundle wrapper around these files that gets stripped off when we transfer them to another drive containing a different OS (or via FTP) or send them via email. The bundle method only works for files that are already bundles (Keynote) or for filetypes we create as proprietary to our desktop -- which might work if we provide export options into standard formats.
Anyone know how Tiger is handling this? Are they even using metadata outside of stuff already available (filename, type, date)? What about BeOS -- how was its metadata handled?
J.
