If this growing and distributed burden is more attractive than a 4-byte
naming convention that doesn't interfere with existing processing, then I
suppose we should drop the suffix, and find out how popular this
non-approach proves to be in a couple of years. At that point, it will be
very difficult to fix things. I continue to argue that the suffix is a
remarkably low-cost solution with significant benefits.
Well, you've just convinced me. I hereby retract my assertion that
content sniffing is a "mostly harmless" but partial solution to this
problem. In light of this it doesn't look like a solution at all.
Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
Well, actually, I didn't think about the lesson to be learned from past
attempts to use "magic number" approaches. These have proved to work
spectacularly badly sometimes. Again, PostScript provides one of the better
examples of how things can go wrong: I routinely see problem reports whose
underlying cause is either a false positive or a false negative "PostScript"
result from a content sniffer.
Ned