Re: lynx-dev downloading and metadata

[Walter Ian Kaye]

At 10:09p -0600 04/27/2002, address@hidden didst inscribe upon 
an electronic papyrus:

> In a recent note, Walter Ian Kaye said:
>
>  > Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 20:37:53 -0700
>  >
>  > Maybe it's time to define a set of file metadata headers?
>  > It's something I've often thought about (and even scribbled about 
> somewhere).
>  > Like, "FileMeta-Date-Modified:" and "FileMeta-Mac-Creator:" etc.
>  >
> I believe some such information is incorporated in the MIME types
> "appledouble" and "applesingle"

Yes, but that's Mac specific. As pro-Mac as I am, I'd still like a
platform-agnostic standard for passing metadata along with files.
Back in the days of PReP/CHRP, there were plans for OpenBinary, a
superset of MacBinary designed for any system that could run on
PReP (PowerPC Reference Platform), but that went byebye (I can't
even find any mention of it on the Web, though I did come across
<http://www.nmt.edu/tcc/swinv/cdrecord/1.9/man/mkisofs.8.html>
which has some interesting information about CD file formats),
and it's still a file wrapper; I want something for "unwrapped"
files that will work from any filesystem to any filesystem. If I
download a file from a Mac web server to a Unix filesystem or
download a file from a Windows web server to a Mac filesystem,
it should be the same protocol. Raw file plus metadata.

Even if a StuffIt or Zip file is sent, I want the metadata for
/that/ file to be preserved, not just the encoded file within.

So for HTTP file transfers, the metadata would have to be
transferred using the HTTP headers.

What amazes me is that nobody's done this yet. It seems so
logical to me...


-Walter



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