On Tue, 2 Dec 1997, Erik E. Fair wrote:

.. A thought to consider: Apple's Hierarchical File System (HFS) has a useful
.. notion: the "resource" fork. The best description I ever heard of it was as
.. "extensible meta-data." If you simply define a basic structure that those
.. meta-data aware programs can carry without parsing in an explicit way (e.g.
.. tar, cpio, pax, dump/restore, etc), then whatever meta-data other programs
.. need can be added to any file with non-resource-fork programs being none
.. the wiser.

Actually I think that metadata are more like the Finder Information that
supplements HFS files on a Macintosh. The Finder information is kept in
a database file maintained by the Finder, not in the individual files.

I see both forks of a file as carrying data that is visible and
controllable by the user, while metadata is maintained by the operating
system.

And -- as Erik mentions -- this is not an attempt to discuss the pros and
cons of HFS :-)

- Erik