Quote:Originally posted by Velvet G:I understood. And with that, I think this thread now officially belongs in the Stupid Place. Metadata describing the type of the file's contents are kept in the file header (so the proper icon can be displayed, or the proper application lauched when the file is opened). I prefer the Unix (and MacOS and similar) approach the file system does not require an extension, but neither does it keep you from using one in your own naming convention. But if you can make that distinction in the first place, you don't need the extension at all, do you? I've worked on systems where extensions were required by the file system (VMS), where the file system didn't care, but certain applications did (Unix), and where the file system didn't allow for them at all (MPE). (Hey, I watched a lot of jiggle anime this weekend, gimme a break.)If extensions are to have any meaning, then there should be a mechanism in place to prevent a user from naming a text file as a jpeg file or vice versa. Or executable code (which might draw an ASCII rendering of boobies). For example, there's nothing (AFAIK) preventing me from creating a file named boobies.jpg that contains nothing but ASCII text (which might be an ASCII rendering of boobies). One of my problems with extensions is that there's no good way to enforce agreement between extension name and file contents. jpg.exe would fall for other virii anyway.The Happy Blues Man This can lead to problems, but I think the people who would get confused by. Frankly, I don't think we'll ever see file extensions leave, considering that UNIX doesn't even really use metadata at all, and the Internet doesn't really have any method of handling it.So in conclusion, they're an easy method for dealing with an otherwise hairy problem of where to store the file's type in a way that's very cross-platform. HFS only has two data streams per file, and the file type metadata is part of the "Resource Fork" whose format is defined by the OS so as not to incur possible corruption by user manipulation).But then, Windows is nothing if not backwards-compatible (well, used to be), so all the old holdovers and workarounds for DOS still linger. Metadata doesn't even have to be stored inside the file data itself if we're talking about something like NTFS (which, IIRC, can have infinite data and metadata streams for one filename. Granted, when UNIX and DOS were young, you didn't have the ability to have metadata streams alongside the actual file data like there is with NTFS and (albeit more limitedly) HFS, so it was a good idea to keep the type of file readily available since there was no other place to put it (size and permissions can both be determined from the filesystem itself).Now, however, we don't need this kind of antiquity (which isn't to say that it's not still handy), especially since information of this nature really has no place being put into the filename. The biggest reason is, as Twelve said, the file name should describe the file, not dictate its contents.
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