[X-Unix] What's in an MP3's resource fork..? [Was: Re: [X4U] ._annoying_files on SMB shares - can I remove them..?]

[Albert Lunde]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 05:15:35PM -0700, James Bucanek wrote:
> Resource forks (when properly formatted) contains structured data. [...]
> Resource forks, like so many aspects of the original Macintosh design, 
> were strokes of pure genius.  Unfortunately they still run into 
> nasty implementation problems when forced to live on the infertile 
> ground of single fork file systems.

I agree with both parts of this statement.

I think you should be conservative about deleting resource forks
on mainly cosmetic grounds. They are often providing a function
that's not obvious but which breaks user interface features
when removed. For example Quicktime previews are a pretty
much interoperable feature for some graphic file types,
which _look_ like pure data files (and should be treated
as such when exported to non-Apple web servers). And many
programmer's text editors store font and tab preferences
for specific files in their resource forks. You can
argue why they shouldn't be doing this. I'm just saying
you are likely to break things in subtle ways as well
as causing some total failures for pure-resource
file types.