On Nov 1, 2005, at 6:58 PM, Luke Kanies wrote:
Traditional Unix apps don't seem to do anything with extensions; they
don't
really seem to do any sort of filetype recognition at all, from what I
can
tell. I'm sure there are exceptions, but everything I've seen just
uses
extensions for the humans.
The big traditional exception is "cc". But, yes, that's what I mean
when I say UNIX does a better job with it.
It's just silly to require that kind of intelligence in every
application,
though. Your operating system should support those kind of operations
as a
service, both retrieving the existing metadata and dealing with
wanting to
override it.
The only program that can be expected to create, refresh, or otherwise
organize and manage any *important* metadata associated with a file
(that is, stuff that needs to be there for the application to work) is
the application itself. By definition, application-specific information
is application-specific.
BeOS metadata is useful for humans in organizing and managing
information about files at a higher level, but it's no better a place
to put stuff like hard file types than resource forks, finder info, or
file extensions.
