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RE: file extensions best practice

• To: "'Christian Nentwich'" <christian@s...>
• Subject: RE: file extensions best practice
• From: "bryan" <bry@i...>
• Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 14:28:11 +0200
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <1197291424.20030902115035@s...>

If this applies to windows specifically you can always associate the
file extension with the filetype in the registry, i.e. the extension
.x22 is associated with the filetype xmlfile, this does not necessarily
solve the problem as editors etc. may not be using the registry to read
in a list of extensions related to their filetype. I believe however
that xmlspy and xmetal both attempt to set their editors as the default
for opening files of type xmlfile.

-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Nentwich [mailto:christian@s...] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 12:51 PM
To: xml dev
Subject:  file extensions best practice

All,

I'm hoping to peruse some of your experience on this one. I'm
currently evaluating the pros and cons of having product-specific file
extensions instead of .xml. The pros seem obvious:

- Distinguish the different files (our product has 3 or 4 file types)
at a glance
- The standard GUI file dialogs can filter without doing anything
intelligent like parsing the headers of the file

The cons (?):

- The files are not recognisable as XML files anymore and the standard
XML editors won't list them
- Web servers won't generate the correct headers unless reconfigured
- The space for 3 digit file prefixes is small, and ours would look
like .x?? which make sthe space even smaller

Is there anything I'm missing? What are people's opinions on this?

Christian


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