At 1998-10-25 11:33, Chris Newman wrote:
On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
This seems to be the way things are heading. I personally would like to
see MIME content-type headers used by file-systems, a system superior for
various reasons to the 'magic number', filename-extension and MacOS
4-byte code systems.
As long as we have untyped protocols like FTP, magic numbers will remain
useful.
Oh yes: new file formats should definitely use them where possible. But
unfortunately not all formats have them, so any system that relies on
them exclusively is going to end up typing a large number of files in a
sort of miscellaneous/plain-text/octet-stream category, which is not very
useful.
--
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA