On 2017-12-14 13:22:54 +0000, Mayayana said:
"Tim Streater" wrote
|
| The type of a file and which app you'd like it to open with are items
| of file metadata and have no business being part of the filename.
|
| Many files have such type-identifiers included. E.g., a JPG file begins
| with JFIF, a WordPerfect file includes WPC in the first line, an MS .doc
|
| Then you've put the metadata inside the file, which is even worse. It
| should be part of the file system.

This is the problem with mixing Mac and Windows
discussions. As I understand it, Mac stores file data
separately as a "resource fork". Mac users are not
expected to understand anything about files. That's
not the same as metadata.

Resource forks died with the Classic versions of Mac OS (the very last
version released was 9.2.2 in December 2001), although Mac OS X does
know how deal with them.

Resource forks are usually only used by applications - normal document
/ data files do not have resource forks, so they are not how the OS
knows which application to open a document in. In the application, the
resource fork does contain the information used to establish which
application the document was created / modified in.

Mac OS X applications do still have resources, but they're stored
within a normal file structure, so aren't affected corruption issues
.... although the extra folders and files (including Finder specific
data files on disks or in Zip archives) may cause confusion for Windows
users.




Resource fork used to be a problem when Mac users
emailed photos. If they didn't know to strip the Mac-
specific prepended data they'd send a corrupt file.

Nope, not a Mac user problem, and photos, being document / data files,
don't normally have resources forks anyway.

The application files emailed were corrupted by Windows (either the OS
on the receiver's computer or the OS on the servers the file travelled
through) not knowing how to handle the two forks. Applications files
could also be corrupted by trying to transfer them on Windows formatted
disks. Either way, this was easily worked around by first compressing
the application file using a Mac archiving utility such as Compact Pro
or StuffIt.