Re: Moving away from app-centric mimetypes (e.g. kword)
Dave Leigh <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.kde.look |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Tuesday 14 May 2002 13:59, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote: > 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. Unfortunately, even on a single machine not EVERYBODY uses KDE. In my home I've got one machine that's used by three people (two users access it using Exceed from Windows boxes.) Only two users use KDE. On a multi-user machine the desktop-specific wrapper approach is clearly unworkable. However, XML files like KOffice and OpenOffice already allow metadata. There seems to me to be no need for a wrapper. -- Dave Leigh, Consulting Systems Analyst Cratchit.org http://www.cratchit.org 864-427-7008 (direct) AIM or Yahoo!: leighdf MSN: [email protected] ICQ: 37839381 Universe, n.: The problem.