Mac OS X Anti Metadata

While the innovations of resource forks and type and creator codes were nice to have during the early days of the Macintosh, the internet has resulted in a tremendous increase in file mobility. In 1984 the chances of coming across a file from another machine were remote.

With web browsers and click to download web pages, Macintosh users are using more foreign files than locally created ones. This has resulted in more and more frustration for Mac users as locally created files were often damaged in transit as resource forks and type/creator information was stripped by conventional internet gateways. The "hiding" of type creator information and lack of alternative type identification typically left users confused and unable to fix these problems themselves.

In a networked world, I applaud the elimination of resource forks and non-standard meta data. While I understand the need to use HFS+ as the main file system to maintain backwards compatibility with older Mac files, I don't believe we should be using anything not available in a standard unix file system going forwards.

Bottom line - lets stress interoperability in the internet age. All of the mechanisms the old file system provided can be emulated with the more portable directory wrappers and file extensions. Lets use them.