The Mac, Metadata, and the World

Rick Zeman writes: "ArsTechnica has posted yet another compelling article, this time on metadata, its history and the future of metadata storage as seemingly indicated by Apple in OS X. Extensions==Bad!"

Comments

Re:Linux thoughts

[TWR]

I think part of the Mac fascination with file type is due to the monolithic program structure; you find the file, and then you open a single program that does to it anything that you will ever do to it. In this model, there is a right program, and which program is right is based on file type. Windows clearly suffers greatly from having this model but not having a more reliable fashion of determining file type than Linux.

You clearly don't understand the type and creator fields.

There are TWO separate fields for each file in the classic Mac OS. One (TYPE) indicates what kind of file it is. The other (CREATOR) indicates what program will open the file by default. Each is four bytes long.

The nice thing about this system is that you get a clean separation between file typing AND default launching application. It's other OSes which have the "monolithic" structure you're talking about.

Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that the MacOS scheme is equivalent to having 4 character extensions which aren't displayed, with the corresponding problem of having malicious executables named README.txt (or even README)?

First of all, it'd be an 8 character extension. Secondly, List view on a Mac shows file type by default; an application is listed as "application program". Granted icon view won't discriminate unless you do a get info or sort by kind. Finally, if you don't trust the source of a file, don't open the file. This is common sense, no matter what extensions you are showing or whatever file system you are using.

-jon