Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!stat!fsu!loligo!pepke
From: pepke@loligo (Eric Pepke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Something else you can't do on the Mac
Message-ID: <424@fsu.scri.fsu.edu>
Date: 5 Jan 90 15:55:30 GMT
References: <21628@mimsy.umd.edu> <3470@hub.UUCP> <10287@zodiac.ADS.COM> <10785@claris.com>
Sender: news@fsu.scri.fsu.edu
Reply-To: pepke@loligo.UUCP (Eric Pepke)
Organization: Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
Lines: 44

In article <10785@claris.com> peirce@claris.com (Michael Peirce) writes:
>In article <10287@zodiac.ADS.COM> jtn@zodiac.ADS.COM (John Nelson) writes:
>>You have a pure text file and you want to open it so you double click
>>on it.  Ooops, there's obviously no application for something called
>>"document" so the finder automatically pops up a menu of popular
>>applications for the user to select from and then opens up the
>>document with the selected application.  Or the finder could be
>>programmed to open "documents" with a default application like
>>Teachtext.
>>
>Well, I disagree (obviously).  If I'm trying to open a MacDraw II file and
>don't have MacDraw II around, having TeachText open it up "by default" is
>a horrible solution.  All I'll see is garbage.  Same with an Excel document,
>etc.  This would REALLY confuse nonHacker users. 

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!  You only do this for files of a certain
type, in this case TEXT.  It's when the creator doesn't correspond with 
anything that a default of TeachText or QUED or whatever is appropriate.

This can be generalized to any file type.  Let's say you have a PICT file, of
type FMBR.  There is no application with signature FMBR on your disk.  
However, you do have MacDraw and PixelPaint, both of which can deal with 
PICT files.  The finder knows that they can because both applications 
publish FREFs for PICT files created by them.  

Forget the idea of the one to one correspondence between documents and 
applications.  The type of a file describes its contents, and any 
application which knows how to deal with that type of file can open it.
Files with a creator that corresponds to a real application specify a
default application to use.  Double-clicking these files should open the
default application (it currently does).  Files with a creator of '    ' or 
???? proclaim that there is no default application.  Double-clicking these
files should either give the user a choice of applications or open a user-
specified global default for that file type.  Currently, the Mac just whines.
Files with a creator that corresponds to a missing application are a problem.
They can be handled either like ???? applications should be or by whining.  I
consider the former preferable.

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