5 ms·
It's not the picture that broke, it's not the user that is dumb, but the system that is broken. Dot extensions is a concept that should never have seen the ligh
by astrobe_ 7y ago
It's not the picture that broke, it's not the user that is dumb, but the system that is broken. Dot extensions is a concept that should never have seen the light of the 21st century. Or at least it should be a last resort for the system to guess the file format for those formats that don't have magic numbers in their headers or for lesser known formats.
- cm2187 7y agoOr more generally the header should contain the metadata of the file: date modified, filetype, comments, icon, etc, rather than spreading that between the filesystem (with different filesystems having inconsistent dates), the OS, etc.
- NikkiA 7y agoI disagree, locality data such as ownership, modified date, comments, permissions even, should not be part of the file, it breaks things like repeatable builds, version control and anything where the contents of the file are considered static. shadow files (._*) and directory clutter (.DS_Store/desktop.ini) are one solution, but they're ugly and frustrating, having separate areas in the filestore (like a resource fork, but designed to be ephemeral) are a much more sane solution.
- cm2187 7y agoI don't think it breaks anything. If the world had gone this way, all the functions you use to read a file would read the data from the first byte after the header.
- NikkiA 7y agoIn that situation the metadata is no longer part of the 'file' then, and would be lost by a 3rd party copy function unless extra API functions are used to copy the metadata. At this point, it might as well be a "resource fork" or whatever you want to call your secondary file contents at the fs layer shrug