[openbeos] Re: FS attributes
- From: "Alexander G. M. Smith" <agmsmith@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2002 12:32:47 EST
Jeremy Powers <jpowers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Sun, 06 Jan 2002 18:34:47 -0800:
> And I may just be crazy, but it occurs to me that file types should
> refer to the specific collection and interpretation of attributes,
> rather than one main data chunk. Pretty much all file types require
> some kind of meta-data and organization - what is to keep this from
> being done with attributes? (besides speed, complexity, ect...)
Currently attributes themselves have a simple type, defined by a code that
specifies int-32, int-64, float, double, string, MIME-string or boolean.
Might also be a few date and time formats too. The type of a file is
stored as a MIME string in an attribute called "BEOS:TYPE". If you wanted
to label attributes with a type (rather than using codes), that would mean
having an attribute on an attribute. Or perhaps make the list of codes
extensible - a global dictionary would tell the application that the
attribute with code 42 is type audio/x-mpeg. But then what would the type
of the overall "file" be? Currently the overall type is the type of the
main data, which could be considered an attribute with no name.
> ID3 tags on mp3s are a good example of this. Stick the sound data in
> one (probably main) attribute, then the name, artist, date, etc in
> others. Conversion from flat file to attributed would be a simple task.
> File types that are better represented as one stream would be defined
> as such, but others gain much in organization.
Hmmmm. Need to think about this - full types for attributes or just for
the overall "file" (which actually contains data and attributes).
- Alex
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