Testing the waters for text/troff

[Ben Morrow]

[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 at morrow.me.uk *