file attributes

[Erik M. van der Poel]

> I think a better solution than extending the Unix file system in this
> way would be to create a file, named say .desktop (or something more
> clever to avoid lawsuits :) which would contain this information, and
> then writing some library calls which would maintain this information
> and make it available to programs.

There are a couple of problems with this approach:

If you put the metadata for several files in one file called .desktop
or whatever, the program that reads this data will be more complex. 
Please remember the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, <censored>).

If you have a file called .desktop or whatever that contains the
metadata, where do you put the metametadata for this metadata .desktop
file? It would be cleaner to hide the metadata from open().


> This also makes the code a lot
> more portable since it doesn't rely on the particular Unix providing
> the facilities you describe.

This brings up another important point. If the user agent goes ahead
and defines all sorts of file attributes and decides on the names for
these attributes, users will not be able to switch user agents. So we
need to create a metadata standard, and we need to register file
attribute names and values with some international authority so that
everyone agrees on their meaning.

For example, for an ordinary European text file, you might put the
following in the metadata:

	Content-Type: text
	Char-Encoding: latin-1

(`Latin-1' is the name of a text encoding standard.)
-
-- 
Erik M. van der Poel                                      erik at sra.co.jp
Software Research Associates, Inc., Tokyo, Japan     TEL +81-3-3234-2692