[I am not a Mac expert...] At 4pm on 25/11/04 you (Bruce Lilly) wrote:
In my search for "Macintosh File Type Code", I found one document that mentions "File Type Codes", but that is specifically for Mac OS 9 and earlier, not for "Macintosh" in general (indeed, "Macintosh" appears nowhere in that document ( http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=55381 )).
Yes. Mac OS X and Mac OS Classic (9 and earlier) are completely separate operating systems that happen to look similar. OSX is a perfectly normal BSDish system with a GUI derived from NeXTStep on top of it. AFAIK OSX doesn't use the Classic file type codes at all, though what it does do by way of 'file associations' I'm not sure. I *certainly* hope it doesn't use file extensions...
On Wed November 24 2004 15:40, Ben Morrow wrote:
In your case, as *roff is unused on Apple systems, you could simply state that there is no Apple type code.
I'm not so sure about that; I have seen literally dozens of references to troff on Apple systems (all seem to refer to "Mac OS X"), so it's certainly not true that "*roff is unused on Apple systems". I recall an Apple UNIX-based system called "Lisa" a few years back, and I know of several versions of troff packages for a variety of platforms, so I would not be at all surprised to find pre-OS-X troff on Apple systems.
This is all true; however, the Mac file type codes are only relevant to Mac OS Classic, which very rarely has *roff installed.
Aside from this specific exercise, there are broader issues that should be addressed in the media type registration form: 1. If what is meant by "Macintosh File Type Code" is in fact "Mac OS 9 File Type Code" it would help if the registration template were revised to say so. It's too late to help me for this case, but it might save others many hours of fruitless searching.
This I would definitely agree with.
2. It would also help if there were a pointer to a definitive source of information for these OS-specific, platform-specific codes. As the registration procedure and template seem to be undergoing an update (draft-freed-media-type-reg-01.txt), that might be a good opportunity to clarify such issues (or perhaps to elide that idiosyncratic item altogether).
No, that would be a bad idea, at least until Classic is firmly in the dustbin of history (I don't think it's quite there, yet). Any sane system of file type identifications would use MIME types directly; however, the registry provides a mapping to legacy systems such as Mac OS types and Win32 file extensions for situations such a browser saving a downloaded file, and web servers giving an entity a type without other explicit information. Ben -- And if you wanna make sense / Whatcha looking at me for? (Fiona Apple) * ben@morrow.me.uk *