Re: The illusion of simplicity and low cost in data design and computing
"Liam R. E. Quin" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.text.xml.devel |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Thu, 2022-08-11 at 22:05 +0100, Michael Kay wrote: > > Eric Raymond's quote would be valid if the operating system > constrained all files to be XML, say. But it's not valid for an > operating system that can support any file format, but can also > reliably tell the application that it's reading an XML file rather > than a JSON file (or more precisely, one that can identity the > application that wrote the file and tell you what claims that > application made about the file format). > MacOS (the pre-Unix OS) could do this (to some extent). It was a pain, and made the system massively less flexible than Unix. For example, if i make an SVG file in Inkscape (to use today's application names), i might then want to look at it in Inkview or in a Web browser, and i might want to edit it in Oxygen XML Editor. Putting the applications before the documents is the wrong way round. However, i do agree that file extensions suck, and the Unix "file" command (Ian Darwin of SoftQuad wrote the public domain version of that) is incredibly useful but limited and not 100% reliable. Of course, nothing is 100% reliable except the statement that noting is 100% reliable... "Open" being able to offer a choices of likely tools seems more useful than identifying a single application, to me at least. liam -- Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/ Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/ XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting. Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations: http://www.fromoldbooks.org _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS to support XML implementation and development. To minimize spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ Or unsubscribe: [email protected] subscribe: [email protected] List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php