Subject: Re: msword doc bug
From: Logan Hall (warrior514@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 14:51:47 CST
sterwill@abisource.com wrote:
> Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> > It is a major bug. One of the complaints of my father is that he has to
> > use file extensions. Come on, people! This is the year 2000! The Macintosh
> > has had pure file name support since 1984. We've got an advanced kernel, a
> > comfortable desktop environment, but most software still relies on the
> > users to tell it the type based on the _file name_! AbiWord should use
> > magic numbers to detremine file types. I did a patch for midnight
> > commander recently implementing this, but I'm not sure I'd be able to do
> > it for AbiWord. It's worth a try :).
>
> I completely agree with everything you say. I don't mean to pick on
> Paul here, who's done most of our Windows front-end development,
> but time and again Windows just doesn't deal with things that aren't
> "extensionised," perhaps for the same reasons that it _still_ really
> stores file names in 8.3. We made decisions to work across the
> lowest-common-denominator. Perhaps very soon we'll have a Mac port,
> and I'm not sure what we'll do there. I believe it's common to preserve
> the extension in the file names when dealing with Microsoft-tainted
> data on the Macintosh (is this true?).
>
No its not true as far as i can remember.. being a long time Mac user, the only
times i see extentions hevily used on the mac is when the *user* is microsoft
tainted and they don't know anybetter. Or the app is badly ported. On the mac
Word doesn't recognize extentions, nor do most apps. It goes off of the magic
number and the type/creater codes to open the files.
> As for the bug... I think it's really just a simple thing to fix (the
> wrong default file type is being used--AbiWord--instead of Auto Detect).
>
> --
> Shaw Terwilliger
------ Logan Hall
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