Re: save file format

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden schemamania org>]

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, Alan Horkan <horkana@maths.tcd.ie> wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, James K. Lowden wrote:
> > On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, "Ribeiro, Glauber" wrote:
> > > I personally think the compression default is good. We could make it
> > > clear to the user by displaying in the "save" dialog something like:
> > > "dia (gzipped xml) format".
> >
> > Honestly, I don't know why anyone would be confused:
> 
> I hope you are joking and your not just an old school Unix user with a
> superiority complex 

[We're a little off-topic, here, but UI stuff often takes philosophical
turns.]

Can I pick "c) both" ?  I use NetBSD, which I guess most people would call
an "old school unix".  ;-)  

I do think it's an error to be mystified by well-documented things.  It's
*only* an error, though, not a character flaw.  One of the bad^W
counterproductive habits folks learn when using proprietary software is
the expectation that they have to guess and infer and be ignorant.  A few
years with free software makes the other side look very dark indeed.  

The OP suggestion was to document the storage format in the save dialog. 
I was just saying it doesn't belong there for several reasons, including
that it's easy to discover.  

> There are more and more Linux users who have not learnt the command line
> utilities and to be fair if I had not picked up a few books and had good
> people to tell me these commands existed I would never have discoverd
> them accidentally.

I know the feeling.  Apropos has failed me many times, and I've perl'ed my
way out only to discover "cat -n" or something three weeks later.  

> You must admit that knowing gunzip instead of gzip is a bit
> obscure.

That I won't give you:

$ man gzip |head
GZIP(1)                                                   GZIP(1)

NAME
       gzip, gunzip, gzcat, zcat - compress or expand files
       [...]

Unless you're using a system with *no* man viewer (or viewing no man
pages) -- in which case you're "up a creek without a paddle", as we say
here -- you can't really avoid finding out about gunzip.  

> You are one small step away from saying RTFM and you know how annoying
> that is.

I don't think so, really, Alan.  I provided the answer, and I wasn't
addressing the OP, except indirectly.  

> The computer must adapt to and serve the user.  I will not become a
> slave to technology but I and most people dont have time to learn the
> inner workings of everthing we use.  I for one think automatic gears on
> cars are a great idea and for most motorists this big simplification is
> great, similarly I dont think hiding the complexity in computers is a
> bad idea either.

Right.  We were talking about a static file format announcement in the
Save dialog.  Your automatic transmission doesn't announce "I just did
third gear for you".  The File Open dialog opens files for you.  The File
Save dialog saves file for you.  You want to know what format that file is
in?  Open the hood.  It's not welded shut.  

> If the whole system was smarter then text editing applications would
> know they cannot handle binary files and you would be provided with a
> hex-editor or the binary would be uncompressed and the textual content
> given to you.  Gzipped XML is so standardized it is pretty poor show if
> a text editor is not smart enough to automatically handle the
> compression for you.

I agree, and file(1) is basically a hack.  The filesystem should have
metadata for such things.  It's really a travesty that none does, given
the number of filesystems that have been developed over the last 10 years.
 

But now we're really off topic.  

Regards, 

--jkl