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On Mon, 31 Oct 2005, Peter da Silva wrote:
> >> Not that any platform is substantially better at this.
>
> Traditional UNIX apps used to look for files with the right extensions
> but happily ignore them if you told them otherwise, with a few
> exceptions (eg, the old trick of linking "tty.c" to "/dev/tty" so you
> could type code in and avoid creating a file).
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.
> > BeOS's system was pretty sweet, and I just don't understand why people
> > haven't stolen it, or at least something like it. Dammit.
>
> Because:
>
> 1. if your applications are smart enough to ignore the metadata when
> you know better, you don't need it.
>
> 2. if they're not, you're just as boned.
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.
--
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com
There's stuff above here
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