Re: lynx-dev downloading and metadata

[clemensF]

> Walter Ian Kaye:

> Yes, but that's Mac specific. As pro-Mac as I am, I'd still like a
> platform-agnostic standard for passing metadata along with files.
> [...]

> What amazes me is that nobody's done this yet. It seems so
> logical to me...

not quite.  people have a notion about meta-data, but just "modified-since"
isn't worth anything to anybody except when eg. mirroring a site.  what
people have is a more logical, application level notion.  like, when paying
bills, they want all data upto last week, which translates easily to
modification times in a filesystem, but that's only a simple example.

> Even if a StuffIt or Zip file is sent, I want the metadata for
> /that/ file to be preserved, not just the encoded file within.

which is your example.  i myself usually don't care, but it becomes
important when i wonder where all these ^M at the line-ends come from.

using mailers, you get metadata in the RFC822 headers, browsers get
HTTP/1.1 headers, both allow downloading them in response to a HEADERS
command.  only thing new in your view of the matter is offering them
regardeless of if they mean anything to current users or not.

as storage costs lessen and protocols/applications more and more make use
of metadata, you will surely see more examples implemented, and it will
become more formalized or abstracted.

-- 
clemens fischer

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