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Like they were in Mac OS back in the day, when files had resource forks and data forks? Or like magic numbers in UNIX/Linux? The whole extension thing was odd

Like they were in Mac OS back in the day, when files had resource forks and data forks? Or like magic numbers in UNIX/Linux? The whole extension thing was odd from the beginning. When I first used Windows, after years of UNIX, extensions puzzled me. On UNIX, they told ME something, the OS and apps didn’t need them (/etc/magic did the trick), but here they were on Windows being given semantic value. Ironically, now that I think about it, I found Windows extensions odd for the same reason that some find hiding dotfiles on UNIX/Linux odd. This makes me chuckle ruefully.

em-bee 4y ago
like resource forks. yes. or extended attributes today. magic numbers are a crude, expensive, and not always working workaround to detect the type of a file based on the first bytes of a data-stream. and there are programs that refuse to load a file if it has an extension that is not supported, even if the content of the file would be just fine. (can't think of an example though, but i definitely remember getting irritated when that happened) what bothered me about extensions in unix is that they were sometimes arbitrary or wrong. especially on the web, where urls had arbitrary extensions that related to how the page was produced, and not the content that was served (which was almost always html. other extensions only matched for files to be downloaded, but you could never trust it, so in most cases it served no purpose)