Two petitions Type/Creator vs. Suffix

[edX]

Sorry for the rant, but people that do not understand just drive me nuts....

well it's good to know that there should be plenty of clients for me in my eventual professsion of psychologist if there are others like you, because there will always be people who don't undertand.

Most of this thread's explanations were started with the purpose of helping me understand this petition thing, which i am becoming more and more convinced that nobody understands, and so nobody should sign either one. testuser asked for others to jump in and help because he acknowledged he only knows so much. Others have. Your contribution was very helpful and written in language i can clearly understand. But as we explore all the things we think we know, we find out all the things we don't. that's a good thing. now if you are reacting to that last line that says we have to do it windows' way because they're bigger than us, then fine, because that one always gets me riled too. The fact is that the biggest guy should be proving his might by being able to do things graciously for the small guy. in other words, M$ should be more flexible than apple, yet it is other way around (now you've got me ranting again).
so one thing that still puzzles me is what are the tradeoffs for the different ways of doing things. I am not sure i understand the real comparitive advantages of each, though some of the shortcomings are getting more visable to me. and i am still not clear how anyone in this discussion would vote on the petition -please clarify (all of you) which side of the original debate you believe yourself to be on.

 

[sveijk]

Originally posted by Jorace



On a MAC system you have not only file type (.jpg) but you also have the creator... Photoshop, Fireworks, Explorer, GraphicConverter.... So now if an application CREATES a file that application ownes that file... On a file per file bases. Not on a type base.

And just for refrence, it would be posable to build a system to keep all this handy metadata without having a forked file!!! Have you ever heared of MP3?? Isnt it STRANGE how they can store all this info about the file in the file itself (Artist, album, year.....) Hey, and it works on a PC to!!!!

Imagine if there was no metadata in mp3 files??? iTunes would just show the file name, and mabe the size... Oh ya, and we know its a mp3!!!

MORE DATA IS BETTER!!!!!

What I have never liked about that approach is the lack of modularity. Apps and systems should not need to write to data containers to record metadata. Just as more data is generally better, so too is more abstraction. I got in a big discussion over this with a friend who develops for MOTU and is a very upset about Apples attempts to deprecate forked files. I proposed more extensive use of bundling. He of scoffed at that idea, and it is much more wasteful of inodes than simple forked files, but it is also even more abstracted and therefore more flexible.

Look at Window XP!!! you can view folders full of images as big huge previews COMPLEATE WITH ALL THE METADATA!!!! That metadata is in the file itself. Take a look at mac aps like iView they can read that data.

My Nikon Digital camera incudes Date, Shuterspeed, Fstop and other usfull metadata in images... (It all shows up in XP!!)

NTFS also supports n-forked files. Too bad MS has never chosen to do anything with that capability, even for their appleshare services. Ever move an alias on an NT fileserver? It'll break.

And what about file size? Date created? Date modified??? Where is this data?? It MUST be in a "FORK" ... WRONG even Windows systems know that METADATA about a file... It is not stored in the file, or in a Fork.. It is part of the filesystem.... That is where OSX should be going... Create a new filesytem that can suport more metadata (Or just buy BFS from palm...)

MacOS/HFS has never had any problems supporting such metadata for un-forked files. That is just inode management. Any file system needs to record that data. However, when you start getting into creators, icons etc. there are real advantages to files carrying their resources with them. The real argument against file forking is that Windows and *n*x don't do it that way. That is sort of the Linux approach to technical questions, "who cares what the best solution is, give us the most convenient?" Often it makes sense. I mean, Linux exists and works quite well in production, while HURD is still mostly a toy. But OSX is not Linux. I would hope Apple, in the interest of insane greatness, would continue to pursue more elegent solution over more convenient ones wherever possible. Hiding file extensions is an ass backwards hack (You can end up with two files in a one directory apparently sharing a name and icon!) which doesn't even approach this standard.

 

[edX]

(You can end up with two files in a one directory apparently sharing a name and icon!) which doesn't even approach this standard.

is this the reason i have seen two identically named files on my desktop at once? it freaked me out. I thought my computer must have developed some bad misconfiguration or virus. I have only ever seen this in osx.

 

[lelereb]

If I set a specific app to open all files of a specific extension/type why someone can override this my preference delivering files whit a specific file creator?

Why my cdrom suffers incredible pain while reading any Mac OS Format cd and goes incredibly happy while readind a standard ISO cd?

Go ahead, X is happier than 9.

 

[chevy]

Originally posted by Jorace

Sorry for the rant, but people that do not understand just drive me nuts....

Thanks for your help, I understand much better now

My point was not about where one should put the information. The .app way (that is a folder with several different information in a convenient order) is fine for me.

What I want is "control": I want to have easy access to file type and owner, and above all, I want easy access to the table that joins the file type with the opening application or the viewer.

Now for the choice of the 3-4 letters that will identify a Word Template or an Excel document or Potoshop image or anything else... lets just vote... (you may have notice I'm from Switzerland, and we like direct democracy)... and it seems normal to me, taht as long as we don't have very special reasons for that, majority decides. You may not be used to democracy, but even if the majority has decided on a law, minority still have the right to propose other ways to do it... and minority sometimes wins... like presenting the information in Windows instead of text mode... and a smart majority will accept that a minority also contributes to the global progression of the system.

Just for Ed, I'm not a programmer.... I just studied programmation like I studied other things in the past, I'm a user. And I still (nearly) only buy Mac machines.

 

[sveijk]

Originally posted by Ed Spruiell

is this the reason i have seen two identically named files on my desktop at once? it freaked me out. I thought my computer must have developed some bad misconfiguration or virus. I have only ever seen this in osx.

Probably. The OS considers foo.app and foo.txt different names. But if it is hiding extensions, they appear to the user as foo and foo. Blech! Extension hiding is also a good way to slip malicious scripts onto people's windows boxes. Foo.txt.scr appears as Foo.txt when Windows is hiding extensions.

 

[sveijk]

Originally posted by testuser
I think that we all agree that having meta-data is valuable.

The reason I care is that the different systems have different capablities. Bundling and forking, or any method that ties metadata to the data, is inherently portable. If that metadata is tied to the file system it is also tied to the machine.

Again, the Mac OS X filesystem is robust.

I wish it were journaling.

The original petition, mentioned in fryke's post, seems to argue for getting rid of type and creator metadata without proposing a suitable replacement. That is why I am against it.

That is pretty damn stupid.

 

[simX]

On the topic of viruses being shown as "foo.txt" in the Finder instead of "foo.txt.src", you could basically do the same thing in OS 9. Just name a file "foo.txt*.src" where the * is a carriage return, put in by copying it from a text editor and pasting it into the filename. The OS 9 Finder would only show "foo.txt", unless you edited the filename. And I'm sure a virus could just NOT have that extension on it.

Hiding filename extensions could cause confusion, but that's EXACTLY why Apple decided to enable a feature to turn off extension hiding for the whole system (enabled by the Finder preferences) AND on a file-by-file basis. This is a very intelligent system, and it only takes a simple command-I, click, drag to find out the real name of a file.

The thing that is bad implementation is Sherlock. Sherlock searches by ACTUAL name, so when you search for something that ends in "foo", it might actually end in "foo.txt", and it wouldn't return that file. To fix this, Apple just needs to put Sherlock to search by visible filename by default, and then have an extra option to search by real filename.

More and more I look at the type/creator code and filename extension battle (combined with the new knowledge of metadeta in OS X that is revealed in the thread called "Type & Creator Puzzle Challenge" in Mac OS X General Discussion), the implementation of filename extensions on Mac OS X, the implementation of filename extensions on Windows, and what conclusion do I come to? Mac OS X has a very well-designed, efficient, and intelligent metadeta system, even better than Mac OS 9.