Re: [Usability]File renaming/extensions

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 17:02, David Lazaro wrote:
> As you can see I'm talking in part from my experience and in part from
> the hypothesis that Mac OS X and Windows got this feature in the default
> set due to proper usability studies. I could be wrong, though.

Of course it is, but things are completely different on Windows (can't
talk about OS X).
First and foremost, every file has an extension, it's not optional. If
you save a textfile as README.it, it will actually be saved as
README.it.txt. Also extensions are always single and they are always
used to determine the filetype, never to actually be an informative part
of the name. That's why hiding them makes perfect sense in a DOS world,
but to make this usefull in a Unix world, you would have to do the same,
forcing file extensions on every file (also special cases like tar.gz
would have to be taken care of) and I believe that's exactly the
opposite of your intention. ;) 

- Daniel