Testing the waters for text/troff

[blilly at erols.com (Bruce Lilly)]

On Wed November 24 2004 15:40, Ben Morrow wrote:
> At  7pm on 23/11/04 you (Bruce Lilly) wrote:
> > some of the obscure things asked for; for example, I have no idea
> > what "Macintosh File Type Code(s)" is supposed to mean
> > [searching for "Macintosh File Type Code" on the Apple web site
> > yielded zero useful results].
> 
> Apple calls them 'creator' and 'type' (IIRC) codes. Each file on an
> Apple (HFS) filesystem is labelled with two four-octet codes, a
> 'creator' which indicates which application to open with and a 'type'
> which indicates which of the formats that application supports this file
> is in. So, for example, a TIFF saved from Photoshop has creator '8BIM'
> which, for reasons best known to Adobe and Apple, means Photoshop, and
> type 'tiff'.

In my search for "Macintosh File Type Code", I found one document
that mentions "File Type Codes", but that is specifically for Mac OS 9
and earlier, not for "Macintosh" in general (indeed, "Macintosh"
appears nowhere in that document (
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=55381
)).

> In your case, as *roff is unused on Apple systems, you could simply
> state that there is no Apple type code.

I'm not so sure about that; I have seen literally dozens of references
to troff on Apple systems (all seem to refer to "Mac OS X"), so it's
certainly not true that "*roff is unused on Apple systems".  I recall
an Apple UNIX-based system called "Lisa" a few years back, and I
know of several versions of troff packages for a variety of platforms,
so I would not be at all surprised to find pre-OS-X troff on Apple
systems.


Aside from this specific exercise, there are broader issues that should
be addressed in the media type registration form:
1. If what is meant by "Macintosh File Type Code" is in fact
    "Mac OS 9 File Type Code" it would help if the registration
   template were revised to say so.  It's too late to help me for
   this case, but it might save others many hours of fruitless
   searching.
2. It would also help if there were a pointer to a definitive source
    of information for these OS-specific, platform-specific codes.
As the registration procedure and template seem to be undergoing
an update (draft-freed-media-type-reg-01.txt), that might be a good
opportunity to clarify such issues (or perhaps to elide that
idiosyncratic item altogether).