Quote:
Originally Posted by rjh
You are correct, I didn't want to complicate the issue unnecessarily - .prc and .pdb are what most end-users see, they are totally unaware of what happens on the device itself. As they should be.
The current PalmOS (hah - its about 4 years old!) makes things somewhat more complicated, in that it does understand file systems and files that are not in RAM and can read and write real .pdb files on the device. Some applications may ignore or require file extensions, especially on external media. TCPMP and Explorer for example both require valid extensions.
Actually, I'm a Linux person and I still think it appears to be silly in retrospect; I know they were reasonable choices when the Palm OS was first developed. It is actually quite a tribute to ingenuity that the PalmOS was able to be extended as far as it was to accommodate usage well outside the original vision.
Why have extensions when they mean so little? And in the context of ebook formats, since they mean so little, why don't vendors make a point of being more explicit when mentioning .pdb wrt to ebook formats?
Its a little like saying a device can handle .zip files without specifying the actual content of the .zip file.
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linux, like Unix does not have any rigorous extension conventions but does have some extensions that have meaning now that Windows has made it popular. .gz is pretty standard and .tgz is an extension of an extension. Things like this can make it a bit easier for the user to determine what a file is but in Unix the user conventions are not enforced by the OS. You can set up your own and they have what meaning you choose.
Mac uses resources and Palm uses a database field to provide for a object oriented interface while Windows requires extensions and a complicated registry to get there. However, an object oriented interface is a good thing when it works properly. Using user visible extensions can break it easily if the user doesn't preserve the extensions (which is why the new releases try and hide the extensions). I would consider Mac and Palm to be elegant and Windows to be silly but YMMV.
Dale