Re: [xml-dev] Reality check needed ....

[Mike Champion <mc@xegesis.org>]

8/7/2002 11:39:33 AM, "K. Ari Krupnikov" <ari@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> wrote:

>Mike Champion <mc@xegesis.org> writes:
>
>> Back to the file extensions, the OS could keep track of metadata to 
>> "know" that a particular file is XHTML, or SVG, or XSLT, irrespective
>> of the extension.  (By keeping track of what application edited the
>> file last).
>
>Isn't that why they invented doctypes, namespaces and MIME types? Why
>would you need to know which application wrote the file last?

I meant "keeping track of what application ..." only as an example one thing
an OS vendor could do, not the canonical way to do it.  Poor wording on my part.

But my larger point was that for non-"Web" content, there aren't doctypes,
namespaces, and MIME types to use, so the OS will have to be more heuristic.
Of course, it might be a Good Thing for OS's to associate MIME types with
files as metadata.  But to beat my favorite drum once again, once you
start getting humans involved in producing metadata, you are likely
to get mostly metacrap, and personal hard disks have litte opportunity to
exploit metadata produced by third parties.  Recall Joshua Allen's observation that 
the whole point of the semantic web is to incorporate metadata produced
by those who do not "own" the resource.  Good point, but irrelevant on a PC.