Re: Magic is useless!

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

James Henstridge wrote:
> 
> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> >>Most major file formats already have a detectable magic byte
...

> Is it just me, or do file extensions and mime types stored in the
> filesystem as metadata seem equivalent?  Both move with the file in the
> filesystem (provided the app/user doesn't decide to change them), and
> won't be available if just reading from a bytestream (in which case you
> will need to get the information some other way, such as file magic).
> 
> The benefit of file extensions is that they are maintained over almost
> every file system type.

and their achilles' heel is that they underspecify the content type;
they
usually indicate encoding and name clashes are very common.

-Bill

> James.
> 
> --
> Email: james daa com au
> WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/
> 
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