2012/10/20 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > When a Major Software Company, which sells the Well-Known Operating System > that I and a few other people use and develop for, decides to add > character-encoding metadata to the file system of that OS
This already exists as a builtin functionality of the filesystem (except that it is not used for this kind of metadata). These are called "ADS" (Alternate Data Streams), and it mostly used today (and extremely frequently) for tracking the origin of the content of the file from another domain (mostly Internet). The storage filesystem in question offers a nice way to store them very efficiently, in a very compact way (just like this filesystem also stores very efficiently small file contents, instead of garbaging full data clusters), and with fast access methods and indexing. On MacOS, these were called "resource forks" (distinguished from "data forks" for file contents). The concept of ADS also exist on other filesystems (including in Windows itself for its "registry", which is another kind of filesystem, or historically as well in VMS whose filesystem, along with the one for MacOS, plus UFS on Unix for "links", largely inpired NTFS). They are not new, they already exist, but they are just underused (except in HTTP where it is builtin and widespread) : We are too much used to the old hierarchical model for filesystems, even if multiple streams can perfectly exist at every level, and have their own separate structures (not necessarily hierarchical).
