At 3:04 PM -0800 3/13/2000, David Bovill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>At the risk of suffering everlasting shame, here is another: on the Mac,
>when you set the file type and creator types with whatever utility, aren't
>you adding a resource to the resource fork of the file. Why is there no way
>of adding this same piece of binary information to the file when it is saved
>on other platforms?
It's basically a problem of differing file structures. Mac files consist of
two parts (resource fork and data fork) plus meta information. (Actually, a
file can be missing the data or resource fork.) The type and creator
signatures are part of the meta information.
A file on another platform consists of (what on the Mac would be) the data
fork, with no resource fork, and no meta information other than the name.
There's no place to store the type and creator signatures.
In theory, this information could be stored somewhere in a PC or Unix file,
but there's no mechanism for pulling it out of the data fork and setting
the meta information correctly when the file is moved to a Mac, so there's
not much point.
--
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.jaedworks.com
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