Re: The illusion of simplicity and low cost in data design and computing

I'm glad someone mentioned the old days of Mac OS, when files had a
"resource fork" and a "data fork", the former containing anything you might
want to know about the bits in the latter. In practice, most people said
it was painful and awkward, but I never went to the mat with it myself so
can't relay the details.

Having said that, all the data you get over HTTP comes with a Content-type,
a reasonably-well-structured but very brief assertion of how the byte
payload is meant to be interpreted. This, in practice, seems to work pretty
well.  Suppose that back in the day, the resource fork had just had the
equivalent of Content-type?



On Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 8:58 AM C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <
[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Roger L Costello <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > Liam Quin wrote:
> >
> >> Putting the applications before the documents
> >> is the wrong way round.
> >
> > I don't understand what that means. Would you (Liam or anyone) explain
> what this means please?
>
> I may be wrong, but for what it's worth I take Liam to be saying that
> identifying a file exclusively with a particular piece of software
> implicitly assumes that the software is the important thing and that the
> data are incidental to the software.  It inhibits and penalizes reuse of
> data, because opening the file with any other application requires extra
> work.  (And may or may not be possible.)
>
> Identifying files by their format rather than by the piece of software
> that wrote them, on the other hand, implicitly assumes that the same
> information may be usable by more than one piece of software.
>
> The one reflects a programmer-centric view of computing, the other an
> information-centric or data-centric view.  I take Liam to be saying that
> the latter is better.
>
> On that question, I think Liam is correct.  But I sometimes think I care
> more about avoiding lockin to specific software than some other people
> do.  I like to think that when I create a document, I am the owner of
> that document.  If there only one piece of software that can read and
> process the document, however, a good case can be made that it is the
> proprietors of that software who really own my document.  I don't like
> the idea of my documents being owned by people whose interests diverge
> so thoroughly from mine; that is why I prefer to create my documents
> using open standards which help ensure that I am never at the mercy of a
> particular vendor, to get access to my documents.
>
> --
> C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
> Black Mesa Technologies LLC
> http://blackmesatech.com
>
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