Re: Files with a substructre should be directories.

On Sun, 26 May 2002 23:38, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:

> The mimetype would be based on the ending, e.g. ".album", so the
> directory "BestOf.album" would be of mimetype application/album. You
> still are able to access each mp3-file on filesystem level.

Oh great, here we go again.

The use of file extensions is an ugly hack from DOS. Its bad enough 
that we have to support them for backwards compatibility and for the 
benefit of Windows users without extending it into new domains.

One of the benefits of metadata (real metadata in the file system, not 
pretend metadata in the file) is that you can associate a file type to 
a file without having to call it <name>.<type>. The same can apply to 
directories.

Better still, you can have a metadata field called "kind", which is 
user-definable. Then you can have a directory of kind "album", a 
directory of kind "photos", a jpeg of kind "humour", a mp3 of kind 
"rock", and a text file of kind "pasta recipes". And without having to 
call the file "mom_recipe.txt.pasta_recipes".

File names are NOT catch-all holders for metadata, and whoever was 
responsible for using the file name to store file type information 
should be tarred and feathered. File names are file names. File types 
are file types. You wouldn't suggest storing the file type information 
encoded in the file creation date, because that would be an evil hack. 
Storing it in the file name is just as evil.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano