- From: Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
- Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 20:01:31 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
- Cc: preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com, papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca, walter@natural-innovations.com, magic-numbers@locke.ccil.org
Participants in the "file types" thread on www-html will probabbly be interested to know that Dan Quinlan, Christos Zoulas, Greg Roelofs and myself have begun a collaboration aimed at writing an Internet RFC on file magic numbers. What we intend to do is (1) build an Internet registry of magic number patterns based on Unix's /etc/magic, (2) build a support library for programs which wish to be magic-number-aware, (3) issue an RFC describing the Registry and the library and promulgating standards for picking magic numbers, and also (4) describing how conformant programs can treat the Internet as a semantically-typed file store. (This would include the kind of application behavior many people on the list have been discussing.) The Magic Numbers project was directly inspired by an earlier remark in the "file types" thread. Interested parties should send me a request to join the magic-numbers mailing list. -- <a href="http://www.ccil.org/~esr/home.html">Eric S. Raymond</a>
Received on Friday, 25 October 1996 19:56:54 UTC