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Re: DocBook filename extension


/ "Brian Lalonde" <brianiacus@yahoo.com> was heard to say:
|> 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?

Because they can be more varied. It avoids the question that this
thread asks. I don't want the type of my file to be determined by the
extension I gave it.

| What other metadata would be useful?

I'm not sure. It'd probably vary by application.

| Are these needs general-purpose enough to be provided by the OS/shell,
| rather than an XML parser?

If you exposed the filesystem metadata in XML, what would the
distinction be? :-)

| 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.

Point taken. The namespace is actually constrained by more than just
uniqueness. You might name Foo files .xq1r, but you probably wouldn't.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Note: you are currently using an
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | unregistered evaluation copy of
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | your life. Register now for the
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