file attributes

[Barry Shein]

The problem with most of these arguments is that they make the best
the enemy of the good. Even the Mac often pops up that familiar
"Application busy or missing" (something like that) error when you
click a generic or unidentified file. So what?

I agree that stricter adherence to the conventions of /etc/magic would
do about 95% what these gui's need (add in file extensions and we get
about 98%, particularly if we write off common cases like a plain text
file just popping up whatever is in your EDITOR environment variable
as a solved case.) If you don't want the default thing to happen then
you have to know something, it's no worse than now.

Actually, I'd be less interested in automatically launching the
application than just being able to display reasonably accurate icons.
Even sophisticated users look at directories scratching their heads
mumbling a Letterman-esque "might be meat, might be cake...". The file
command is critical, but it wouldn't be that awful to follow the
low-resistance path of iconifying the file command.

Anyhow, given the right design it could be made mostly harmless and
optional, which is important.

But, as I said in another note, there's more to file attributes than
gui's, which is probably one of the weaker excuses to get into them.
ACLs, compound documents, and other applications could benefit from a
very simple implementation which effectively adds environment
variables to files or something similar.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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