Comma-Delimited Files on Macs

[Richmond Mathewson]

On 09/21/2011 10:49 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> stephen barncard wrote:
>
>> MAC OS RANT
>> I always thought that file suffixes were the 'old' method of typing 
>> files (
>> a PC problem ) and vastly inferior to the flexibility offered by the 
>> file
>> types property of files. This was a point of OS superiority because it
>> didn't rely on users including file suffixes correctly. And users never
>> liked suffixes and never saw the need for them and often left them 
>> off. Now
>> we have those annoying popups telling me I'm an idiot for changing the
>> suffix.
>>
>>  Even though the resource fork was dropped years ago, the file type and
>> creator was still working until recently.
>> A step backward, IMHO>
>
> Your passion is not without good allies.  When the NeXT team arrived 
> at Apple headquarters, they felt creator codes and file types were 
> "the old Mac way" and had to go.  When news of this crept onto the HI 
> Dev List back in the early days of OS X, the arguments became so 
> heated that it became only the second time in the company's history 
> that they shut down a discussion list.  It was years before it came back.
>
> The arguments such as yours that favored file type and creator codes 
> were what kept them around for another decade.
>
> But alas, finally the NeXT team has had their say....
>

Certainly files types and creator codes made things a lot easier to work out
if one didn't know from where a document originated . . .

Trying to read a document/file of unknown provenance is such a 
time-wasting exercise
nowadays.

. . . I still have a hankering after ResEdit.