Subject: Mac file types (was Re: File types (was Re: msword doc bug))
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Jan 21 2000 - 18:28:14 CST
At 03:18 PM 1/21/00 +0100, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
>According to Paul Rohr <paul@abisource.com>:
>
>> MacOS resource fork has magic cookies for filetype & creating app
>
>It NOT in the resource fork but in the file metadata.
Doh! Sorry about the sloppy terminology. I figured anyone working on the
Mac port would translate appropriately, and nobody else would notice or care.
Silly me. :-)
>Don't forget to register the creator and type with Apple. This is free of
>charge.
Yes, we'll definitely want to do this as soon as we've got any Mac-specific
logic to open and save these files. Presumably each importer/exporter would
also need to know how to recognize/emit the relevant Mac creator and type.
To get things rolling, here are some **totally naive** suggestions for what
we should use, based on a quick Google search:
1. File types
--------------
Obviously, wherever possible we want to reuse the existing file type strings
that everyone else uses. Does anyone know of a publicly-available, fairly
current list of these? The only thing I found was almost 5 years old.
For formats that we invent and need to register, presumably we could just
use variants of the existing suffixes used on other platforms. Thus, we'd
wind up with something like the following:
importer type creator(s)
-------- ---- ----------
.abw ABW ABIW
.doc WDBN MSWD, WPC2, BOBO, etc.
.dot sDBN MSWD
.rtf RTF ABIW, MSWD, etc.
.txt TEXT ABIW, ttxt, R*ch, MSIE, MOSS, etc.
.utf8 UTF8 ABIW
.zabw zABW ABIW
exporter type
-------- ----
.abw ABW
.html HTML
.rtf RTF
.tex TEX
.txt TEXT
.utf8 UTF8
.zabw zABW
Note that some of these (HTML, RTF, TEXT, UTF8, etc.) are blind guesses, and
need to be checked.
2. Creator
-----------
Since using all four letters seems to be canonical practice, do we just use
ABIW for this? I'm presuming that versioning (ABW1, ABW2, etc.) isn't
really necessary or desirable here.
One thing I'm not sure about, though -- when we save an edited version of a
file created by some other app, I'm not clear whether we should:
- always change the creator to ABIW (since we last messed with it), or
- attempt to preserve the original creator
Fortunately, these questions should all be pretty easy to resolve once the
folks working on the Mac port get to that point.
Paul
PS: How's that going, by the way? :-)
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