Re: meeting about digital standards-longish
Re: meeting about digital standards-longish
- Subject: Re: meeting about digital standards-longish
- From: Jan Steinman <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 16:54:53 -0800
Do we also want to make things UNIX-friendly, with_no_spaces? That
one may be a tougher sell...
I don't think so. In fact, spaces are legal in UNIX, and can
certainly be used from a shell when properly quoted ("file name" for
example), or can generally be used from any GUI that does not need to
parse command line arguments. Also, you can easily change the
environment variable IFS to make the field separator something other
than space, so although space is conventional, it is not a fixed
illegal character. Shell scripts are free to temporarily change IFS,
for example.
If one is inclined to make concessions to the UNIX community, it
would make more sense to outlaw path separators, which are NOT
allowed in file names, no matter how they are quoted. MacOS and
Windows have similar constraints with other characters, so I would
submit that all of "/", "\", and ":" should be outlawed, since using
ANY of those characters WILL result in an unusable file name on some
other system.
--
: Jan Steinman <
mailto:email@hidden>
: Bytesmiths <
http://www.bytesmiths.com>