16 Mar
2007
16 Mar
'07
7:40 a.m.
On 3/16/07, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
I like the concept of the OS just "knowing"
what a file contains without
having an enforced name - but at the same time (and as someone else mentioned
I think), extensions are useful to human beings in order to collate data (and
to avoid the occasional mishap when the OS gets things wrong - as in Dave's
GIF example)
I entirely support the use of file extensions to help humans avoid
ambiguity. I am opposed to the OS enforcing extensions, such as if
you rename FOO.EXE to FOO.BAR, the OS refusing to execute the file
arbitraily.
What really irritates though is people using modern
OSes who are still stuck
in the dark ages of DOS 3-letter extensions (people suffixing HTML markup
files with "htm" rather than "html" etc.)
Indeed - I don't know of a modern filesystem that has a fixed number
of chars blocked out after the dot as RT-11 or OS/8 or ODS-1 or MS-DOS
did. There's no reason to be stuck with such a limitation from the
past (though I _do_ use a distinction between .htm and .html on my own
web page - the web server doesn't care, the browsers don't care, but I
have some scripts that distinguish what do to based on how _I_ have
named the files. In short, my own search and 'what's new' scripts
ignore pages named .htm).
So it sounds like we are in agreement here (just so you don't think
I'm trolling ;-)
-ethan