Re: About metadata (long!)

[Raul Wegmann <rwegmann geocities com>]

On 19-Aug-98 Ian Wells wrote:

<snip>

> - if you're really that bothered about all of this, you can make
> directories and treat them as files (Acorn RISCOS does this, at least
> for applications).  That way, there's a file in there which represents 
> the data and a number of other files which represent the metadata, and 
> your filer treats it as one large lump.  But this is a bit horrible
> and it has issues with 'mv' under Unix.
What issues do you mean?


I must admit that I haven't followed this thread too closely, so i may be
writing garbage. Nevertheless, this last idea (using directories to save the
metadata) made me think somewhat about this issue:
- This way, moving, copying and removing files that have metadata associated is
  as easy as doing the same with directories.
- As you always have the data together, there aren't synchronization problems.
- Directories exist on every file system - this makes it possible to have
  files with metadata on almost every computer. 
- Let's assume we have a HTML file, index.html, with some comment as metadata -
  you can still use vi to edit the file, because index.html remains unmodified
  in the directory. OTOH, a GNOME or metadata aware editor allows you to see and
  modify the comment.
- GNOME or metadata aware programs can represent these directories as
  normal files (unless the user wants to see the metadata files explicitly). 
- As every metadata information can or will be in its own file, the user can
  specifically delete metadata, ie the thumbnail ee created for a jpeg image.
- Every program can easily add it's own metadata to the file/directory.
- Even directories may have metadata.
- It's easy to strip the metadata away.

I'm sure there are drawbacks I didn't think of, so I'm ready to hear your
comments.

---------------------------------------
 Raul Wegmann <rwegmann@geocities.com>
 20-Aug-98                    01:20:54

I waited and waited and when no message 
came I knew it must be from you.

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