Re: Add Droplet functionality to Applet...
Re: Add Droplet functionality to Applet...
- Subject: Re: Add Droplet functionality to Applet...
- From: Walter Ian Kaye <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 03:13:22 -0800
At 08:57a -0700 01/06/2004, Doug McNutt didst inscribe upon an
electronic papyrus:
At 23:14 -0800 1/5/04, Paul Berkowitz wrote in response to Tim Bumgarner:
>I've never heard of 3-character file types. AFAIK they're all 4 characters,
>e.g. "jpeg", "gif ". No? (I don't know if those are the correct 4-character
>versions or not.)
CPM and the MSDOS world standard never heard of 4 character types.
Earlier standards, AOS, UNIX, VMS, just used everything after the
last dot in the file name.
Right.
OS 9 and its four byte type codes were officially buried by Steve a
few years ago
No they weren't. They simply got overshadowed by a new, strong
insistence on including filename extensions for "interoperability"
reasons.
and Tim is obviously from the next world (pun intended).
Some questions are:
Are the new file types case sensitive?
What new file types? An extension is NOT a file type. If you start
mixing up your terminology, you will confuse people. Let's not have
that. It's bad enough that the Finder talks like that, but that's for
alerting non-technical folks. We are technical folks here, so we
should stick to correct terminology.
What if one uses case sensitive HFS+?
Now that's a good question.
Is .jpg made equal to .jpeg by the finder or elsewhere in the OS?
I *always* use .jpeg (jay-peg), never .jpg (jippig). But Internet
Config always specified .jpeg|.jpg|.jpe together, and I presume OS X
continues the same basic level of awareness. (BTW, I include the 'e'
partly because DOS sucks and partly because the fact that they are
photographic EXPERTS seems important to me.)
What characters are allowed in file types? Certainly not a dot.
THOSE ARE NOT FILE TYPES! Those are FILENAME EXTENSIONS.
What else? A null?, A space?, An asterisk? FFFE in UTF-8?
There is a list. I think I saw it in the HIG documentation, but I
surely have it in my old apple-hi-developers list archive. I could
dig it up if you want.
How is the file type officially determined if there are two or more
dots? fubar.tar.gz for instance?
Last dot. "Encoding" is an HTTP thing, not a filesystem thing.
Under what conditions does OX neXt guess at a file type? .command
seems to be assumed for anything with no dots and the execute bit
set, but then X11 gets into the act too.
Files originating on older Macs still have setfile -t 'xxxx' type
codes and they can also have extensions.
Files originating on my OS X machine have OSType codes, too -- and always will.
Which code prevails under what conditions? Are droplets and finder
double clicks treated the same?
Somewhere there needs to be a Bible (case sensitive) with Truth.
Classic was simple.
Check out the Launch Services documentation. Come to think of it,
that's probably where I saw the description of what constitutes a
filename extension.
While you're at it, check out the Documentation Style guidelines,
which talk about how terminology for user documentation differs from
terminology for developer documentation. Perhaps there you will
understand why Finder uses incorrect terminology for filename
extensions, and why you should not here.
-Walter
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