On 1/23/07 at 12:52 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (cb) wrote:
On Jan 23, 2007, at 12:38 PM, Marc CASTEELS wrote:
BASE64 is the best for mailing to both PC and MAC users.
No, base64 is NOT the best for Mac users, AppleDouble is.
Ugh.
:-)
Base64 ignores the resource fork, which the Mac uses (and in
the case of some files, like Applescripts , *needs*).
I don't believe this statement to be absolutely true any more.
On Mac OS X, resource forks and file metadata don't mean what
they used to, and most file content types currently in use can
be transported with Base64 encoding and discard the resource
fork without losing fidelity.
If you're still using Mac OS 9 and working heavily with
documents that require resource forks and file metadata in order
to work correctly, then naturally you'll want to take care to
preserve that info when mailing them -- but I think AppleDouble
isn't the answer; see below.
If you are a Mac user, you should use AppleDouble unless you find that
your PC friends start having problems with your attachments (problems
beyond them saying they got the attachment plus another version that
is unreadable and who's name starts with a %... and you can't convince
them to just ignore that copy of it).
With respect, I must differ. If you are sending a Mac file to a
recipient on a Mac, it's impossible to go wrong using BinHex. If
you are sending a cross-platform file (text, Word, Excel, RTF,
most image formats, maybe even Photoshop documents) to a
recipient on any platform, Base64 should do just fine.
The _one_ time AppleDouble is useful is when the file needs to
pass through a non-Mac recipient to get to a Mac, and by this I
mean that the recipient of the email is reading the message and
extracting the enclosure on a PC and will eventually get the
file onto a Mac. But that's a pretty specialized set of
circumstances that rarely occurs in nature.
R.
--
Rich Siegel Bare Bones Software, Inc.
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.barebones.com/>
Someday I'll look back on all this and laugh... until they
sedate me.
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