Jon Glass (jonglass_at_usa.net) wrote:
> As for doing this, with OS X, it's going to work less and less, or am I
> wrong about this?
Under Mac OS X, resource forks are still supported, but the use of
resource _files_, bundled with other files within a package, is strongly
encouraged. While the package concept is a powerful generalization of the
forks concept, it lacks some of the advantages of the latter. With forks,
you could store the actual content, be it text, a bitmap image or
whatever, in the data fork, and all application-specific additions in the
resource fork. Word processor could use the resource fork for storing
style data, or use it to remember the last position of the insertion mark
etc., graphics apps could store the last zoom value etc.. This scheme
allowed applications to add all kind of app-specific data, while
maintaining compatibility with other apps which could still access the
raw content stored in the data fork. To extend this concept to packages,
applications would have to adopt a standard for storing data within the
package, something I don't see happening. Another nice feature of the
fork concept was that you could easily exchange file between different
platforms: if you uploaded a JPEG file to a web server and the image file
contained a preview thumbnail and a custom icon in the resource fork,
your FTP client would do the right thing, i.e. throw away the resource
fork and upload just the data fork. I don't see how you could do the same
with packages. In theory, packages should make it easier to transfer
documents between different platforms, but in practice, the opposite
seems to be true: you don't want to upload JPEG or HTML files as packages
to your web server, or mail a package as an attachment to a Windows user.
- Michael
Michael J. Hussmann
E-mail: michael_at_michael-hussmann.de
WWW: http://michael-hussmann.de
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