Re: Magic is useless!

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

...

>>The disadvantage of file extensions is that they limit what the user
>>can name the file, and break if the user renames the file in an
>>unapproved way. There are certainly tradeoffs here.
>>
>Of course, if the file manager doesn't display the file extensions (such 
>as explorer on Windows, and I believe finder on MacOS also (for UFS 
>partitions)), then the user won't change them.  In windows, if you turn 
>on file extension display, it will still warn you if you try to change a 
>file extension.
>
>You could argue that a mime type metadata would be just as fragile as 
>extensions.  What happens when a user attempts to change their GIF files 
>to PNG format by simply changing the mime type metadata?  They would be 
>just as screwed as if they just changed the file extensions and that was 
>used to determine file type.

A non-technically-savvy user changing MIME type metadata seems much less likely thantheir  changing 
file extensions (or specifying extension poorly in "save as").  The latter happens all the time, so 
this doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

Also there is no "registry" for file extensions, there are already lots of clashes since many/most 
apps lay claim to extensions without much research as to whether they are already being used by 
other apps.  "doc" being possibly the worst example...  

And what of a user who wants to (or must) use one tool to view data in a particular encoding and 
another for other encodings of the "same" basic type?  

-Bill

>James.
>
>-- 
>Email: james daa com au
>WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/
>
>
>
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------
Bill Haneman x19279
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland