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Re: Re: DocBook filename extension


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Norman Walsh" <ndw@nwalsh.com>
To: <docbook@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2002 5:52 AM
Subject: DOCBOOK: Re: DocBook filename extension


> But once you've got a lot of your data in XML, you can imagine a tool
> that extracts more metadata about a document than just its filename. I

Labeling containers on the inside seems really inefficient and opaque.

> can imagine being able to write Make-style rules that are based on
> doctype or namespace name in addition to just filename.

Hmmm... xmake: XML awareness and a format that uses XML syntax.
Sounds like a cool idea.

> Some of this could be shunted off into the filesystem. Why shouldn't a
> filesystem be able to tell you the MIME type of a document, at least,
> in addition to it's name and size and other properties? Watching

When is a MIME type more useful than an extension?
What other metadata would be useful?
Are these needs general-purpose enough to be provided by the OS/shell,
rather than an XML parser?

> Windows try to associate applications with data files based on three
> letter extensions should have tought us by now that there has to be a
> better way. Extensions just aren't a big enough namespace (in the
> non-XML sense) for the functionality we need.

Windows extensions haven't been limited to three letters for quite a while.
Extensions are a *large* enough namespace, though it might be nice if 
datatypes were more polymorphic.



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