Hey Stefano, Don't you use Mac OS X now? You know what apple really got wrong in the finder? They use file extentions!!! OS9- had file attributes to store typing information. That has it's advantages and disadvantages- Unix has this perfectly wonderful system for typing, /usr/bin/file and /etc/magic. Apple moved to unix and the finder doesn't use this system!?!
Here's a fun exersize. Take an mp3, post it someplace (ftp, http) download it to your home directory on a mac and do the same in linux. Double click it in the finder on the mac; in Nautilus on linux. It will play. Here's the fun part. Rename that file song.mp3 to song.zip. Download it again. Double click. It shouldn't be a filesystem module poking into the file trying to guess it's type-- that should be beyond the scope of the file system. It should be the shell using a command like file that figures out syntactically and symantically what the file is and what it can do with it. Tim On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 03:03:20PM -0500, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: > > On Tuesday, Jul 15, 2003, at 13:49 America/Guayaquil, Tony Collen wrote: > > > Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: > > > > <snip-cool-stuff/> > > > >> changes the content of the node! right from the command line. You can > >> use symlinks to share content between your document!!! you can have > >> ACL at the node level!!! just write an xgrep and you are able to do > >> xpath searches from the command line! just add an XML parser and you > >> are able to do something like > >> cat xhtml.dtd > /document/@schema > >> and when you save your stuff as /document, the file system will > >> trigger an error if the file is not valid! > >> Imagine all the stuff that you can do with this! and the file system > >> can be journalled, offer node-level transactional capabilities, you > >> name it! at right into the OS. fast fast fast! > > > > This is all really cool.. the only thing is that it assumes that all > > files are XML. > > NO! that's the beauty > > echo "application/xml" > /document/@mime-type > > Voila' ;-) > > Actually, even better > > echo "xml" > /document/@syntax > echo "text/xhtml" > /document/@mime-type > > because MIME is getting it all wrong with this stupid +xml by mixing > concerns between the syntax and the semantics. > > Do you see the potential? > > > The obvious question is what happens when you try to do an xpath > > expression on a file that is not XML. Perhaps the filesystem module > > would know enough to check for <?xml version="1.0"?> ? > > ARRRRRGGGG! > > > > > Lots of potential though :) Maybe you could tie a service to a > > virtual device. Like /dev/xupdate or /dev/xalan, and output to > STDOUT? > > > > That's much better talking, bro ;-) > > -- > Stefano.
