On 2017-12-14 20:28:16 +0000, Andre G. Isaak said:
In article , Wolf K
wrote:
On 2017-12-14 10:18, nospam wrote:
In article , 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".

No, you have it back to front. File data went in the data fork,
metadata went in the resource fork.

no it didn't.

metadata was kept in the file system.

the resource fork (which was optional, as was the data fork) held
various resources. it was basically a miniature database.

a zero-length file would have an empty data *and* resource fork. rare,
but possible.

Unfortunately Apple has abandoned
this idea and settled for the lowest-common-denominator approach, and
w're all the worse off for it.

yep.

Educate me. What's the advantage of the "forks"? As described, it looks
like metadata with a fancy name, apparently conceived as attached to or
pointed to by the file. Presumably it's stored separately from the file.

Resource Forks are completely unrelated to metadata.

The 2-fork architecture was inherited from Classic Mac OS, and, while
still supported by mac OS X, it is used much less frequently.

In Classic Mac OS, every file consisted of two separate forks (either of
which could be empty).
snip

Wrong.

Purely data files, such as a JPEG image or Word document, did not have
any resource fork at all, not even an empty one. They didn't need one
because there are no resources. That's why if you try to open a data
file in ResEdit it says there is no resource fork and asks if you want
to add one. (An optional add-on did allow ResEdit to open the data
fork).

Mainly it was only applications that had resource forks.


Many people confuse the Finder's information as being part of the
resource fork, but they are different. The Finder's information is not
stored inside the file at all.