Re(2): [vorbis-dev] Mime Type and Ogg (More)

[Chris Hanson]

At 3:41 AM -0700 10/17/00, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>But handling of tar files and compressed files and other such stuff is
>a pretty broken area in most file managers; it's very hard to get
>right becaust it doesn't want to play nice with the mime type
>framework.

Perhaps this shows that the MIME type framework is inadequate for 
what you want to do.

On the Macintosh, all files have two four-character codes associated 
with them:  Type, and creator.  The type code indicates the type of 
the file, such as text ('TEXT'), QuickTime movie ('MOOV'), PICT image 
('PICT'), application ('APPL'), etc.

The creator code indicates which application should open a given 
file.  Say I have a bunch of audio files.  I don't want to open them 
in QuickTime player (which is the standard A/V player on MacOS); I'd 
rather open them in SoundJam.  By making their creator the same as 
the SoundJam application's, I can do just that, *without* changing 
their type information.  After all, some of them might actually be 
QuickTime movies containing only audio tracks; should there be some 
sort of special "audio-only QuickTime movie" code, or should the 
playback software be intelligent enough when dealing with container 
formats to know what it can and can't handle?

(Just as an aside, MacOS uses the same type codes for C source code, 
HTML, and text files:  'TEXT'.  The reason C source code opens in 
CodeWarrior, HTML opens in BBEdit, and text files open in SimpleText 
is that all of these files have different creator codes.  It works 
great.)


-- 
Christopher M. Hanson <cmh at bDistributed.com>
President & CEO
bDistributed.com, Inc.
Developers of database-backed web sites

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