Subject: Re: Mac file types (was Re: File types (was Re: msword doc bug))
From: Hubert Figuiere (hfiguiere@teaser.fr)
Date: Mon Jan 24 2000 - 04:39:49 CST
According to Paul Rohr <paul@abisource.com>:
> 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)
> -------- ---- ----------
Don't care about the creator. Once you have registered a file type it is
used whatever is the creator. The creator only refers to the app that
created the file.
> .abw ABW ABIW
> .doc WDBN MSWD, WPC2, BOBO, etc.
Word files also have WDB6 and WDB8 if I remember correclty (word 6 and 8).
WDBN if for Word 3/4/5 not supported yet.
> .dot sDBN MSWD
Same. See above.
> .rtf RTF ABIW, MSWD, etc.
RTF aslo uses TEXT. Yes, it is dumb. We must check a TEXT file against RTF
content recognition.
> .txt TEXT ABIW, ttxt, R*ch, MSIE, MOSS, etc.
> .utf8 UTF8 ABIW
!!! I didn't know this existed.
> .zabw zABW ABIW
Just use 'Gzip' since it is a gzip file. Perhaps we can consider both as a
valid type.
>
> exporter type
> -------- ----
[...]
> .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?
ABIW is currently free for use as a creator and a file type.
zABW too.
See <http://developer.apple.com/dev/cftype/>
>I'm presuming that versioning (ABW1, ABW2, etc.) isn't
> really necessary or desirable here.
No. I don't think unless they are radically different.
> 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
That's a policy that we should think about. But usually the later editor is
set to the owner.
BTW, there is a couple of creators that should be considered as "orphan"
because they are used as default in some case by some FTP clients,
PC/Exchange utilities, etc. This should be checked too.
> Fortunately, these questions should all be pretty easy to resolve once the
> folks working on the Mac port get to that point.
Is there somebody on this. I'd like to help but I currently don't have the
time to get involved on the Mac version (but I can help on the UN*X version
as I use Linux and BSD as workstations at work :=))
Hub
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