Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!touch!mikeh
From: mikeh@touch.touch.com (Mike Haas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: De-macification of the Amiga (Re: The Amiga's Future)
Message-ID: <247@touch.touch.com>
Date: 28 Jun 91 02:12:19 GMT
References: <85@ryptyde.UUCP> <1991Jun22.045446.2732@Sugar.NeoSoft.com> <102@ryptyde.UUCP>
Organization: Touch Communications
Lines: 41

In article <102@ryptyde.UUCP> dant@ryptyde.UUCP (Daniel Tracy) writes:
>talking about interchange formats, documents. The interchange format docs
>on the Macintosh don't NEED a resource fork and couldn't care less if they
>had one! Our bitmap, drawing, text, formatted text, movie, sound, etc.
>don't need resources, although they can be transfered into one (some of
>them). You can just as easily use them on other machines. So what is
>the interchange advantage of the Amiga?

Wrong.  Almost all mac software incessantly uses resources.  Formatting
for text (fonts, bitmaps, etc) are in FONT resources, graphic bitmaps
in PICT resources, programs in CODE resources, on and on and on.

You only get to save something without resources if the specific application
allows you to save in special formats.  Usually, you are then rendered
incompatible with other mac stuff.

So, mac files CAN SOMETIMES be used on other platforms and RTF-formatted WP
documents are a good example of this.

But in the standard dual-fork format, you play hell getting these sent to
another platform for use.

there are currently 3 standards in use for "serializing" the dual-forks
Macbinary, Macbinary II, and Applesingle (apple's 'offishul' standard).
My company, which provides x.400 mail service to the OSI community
is experiencing problems with the existance of multiple "standards".

Even if we support all 3 (whew!...the work!), we can't know what format
a particular recipient's software will support!

Believe me, the dual-fork mac format causes MANY MANY interoperability
problems.  Most revolve around the fact that the 2 forks have to be
combined into one entity to transmit over a given medium.  This is
fine as long as things stay proprietary (like appletalk), but the
very second you mention "interoperability" or "open systems"
you're hosed!

Since PC, UNIX, AMIGA etc. files are already just single entities,
 this is not a problem.  Just ship it to the other machine.  The
foriegn software just has to interpret the data that's there...it
doesn't have to figure out how to "decode" it.