On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, Jukka Marin wrote:

> Sorry, but I think this is one of the worst things on mac. ;-)  When an
> average user (like me) transfers a file from mac to some real computer
> (sorry :), he will soon discover that he can't read the gif/tiff/whatever
> file on other systems because mac has corrupted the file by adding 128
> bytes of garbage in front of it.

This is misinformation; I don't dispute that this happened to you, but
your deduction that it is an inherent consequence of the resource fork
scheme is flawed.

Most Mac file transfers -- all that I'm aware of, actually -- copy only
the data fork of the file out.  The resource fork is not a part of the
file's data.  If you got an extra 128 bytes of garbage, either your
software was buggy or you've run into some limitation of the file format
(TIFF is notoriously non-standard, for example).

FWIW, I think Erik's idea has merit, but we still have the second access
problem here.  I don't have a solution, unfortunately.

--scott