file attributes

[Erik M. van der Poel]

> Even the Mac often pops up that familiar
> "Application busy or missing" (something like that) error when you
> click a generic or unidentified file.

If the computer cannot handle a particular piece of data, the human
should be able to find out what the data is, in order to take
appropriate action (e.g. buy a copy of the application). That is why
we need human-readable metadata.

The magic number scheme was designed at a time when computer nerds
were excessively worried about disk space and efficiency. Disk prices
are coming down, and shared libraries are becoming universal. We don't
need to worry about disk space and efficiency that much. Let's give
the ordinary humans some readable metadata. And let's give the
programmers some metadata that is extremely easy to parse, and very
extensible.
-
-- 
Erik M. van der Poel                                      erik at sra.co.jp
Software Research Associates, Inc., Tokyo, Japan     TEL +81-3-3234-2692