Re: Moving away from app-centric mimetypes (e.g. kword)

On Tuesday 14 May 2002 17:15, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>
> Unfortunately, without kernel support, I can't see any practical method
> for associating metadata with a file in a way that is 100% transparent
> to the user.
>
I can't see any reason to place this kind of thing in the kernel. 
 What you want is are attribute-extended files. As a you say yourself the 
metadata belongs with the data.

Proof of concept:
Take alle Kword, text- and media-files + whatever. Place them in a new 
MIME/file-type: KDE-extended-files. This would be a format with 
header+data+attributes. The header-section would contain MIME-, encoding- and 
possible encryption and compression infomation. The data-section would be the 
ordinary file and the attribute-section; the system/user defined extended 
attributes. Konqueror and other KDE-program could then use, extract and 
modify the attributes all they want and while people use KDE this would be 
100% transparent. The only problem is that files would need to be exported 
without the attributes for systems that dont recognize the KDE-extended-file 
wrapper.