12 Dec
2011
12 Dec
'11
4:26 p.m.
On 12/12/11 9:35 AM, John Foust wrote:
At 08:08 AM 12/12/2011, Toby Thain wrote:
See: HTTP Content-Type. It's frequently wrong, out there on the intertubes.
--Toby
Extensions are extensions. All the above is just
interpretation. File association is not rocket science (though it's been reinvented
too many times). The interesting exception is classic MacOS with its type/creator codes
independent of extension (and where extensions were initially absent, though like Unix,
supported as part of the file name).
So Apple hid the four bytes of the extension in the resource fork, plus
other stuff.
Unix hides metadata about files, too - timestamp, owner, permissions - and
they certainly quickly adopted naming conventions since, oh, 'a.out'.
If someone chose to create their C source files with a '.o' extension
and their makefile made object files ending in '.c', it would be widely
recognized as a joke, right?
- John