Streamlining, Even in Small Ways
by Joerg Palmer
When I think about AFP’s potential, I often think of ways it can be made more flexible and more accessible. That extends to the Consortium’s work on metadata tagging, support for a wider variety of use cases, and so on. But it also is evident in small, quality-of-life changes. Recently, we made one such change: registering AFP media types with IANA.
IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, handles a variety of duties, including management and assignment of top-level domains, coordination of global IP addresses and AS numbers, and, most importantly to our discussion here, maintaining a database of protocols for various Media Types.
Media Type, formerly known as MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) type, is a way of identifying files according to their nature and format. When you try to open a file with a strange extension, your computer consults the Media Type registry for “advice” on what to do with it.
Now that AFP extensions have been registered with IANA, when a user receives or finds an AFP file, they can simply attempt to open it. That will produce a dialog box providing the option to consult the Media Type database or select from a list of already-installed programs. Once an appropriate program is installed and associated with the file extension, opening the file in the appropriate program works just as quickly and intuitively as opening a .doc with Microsoft Word installed.
This may not sound like much, but without Media Type registration, AFP users in the past have had to manually open the appropriate program and then go through its interface to hunt down and open the file. Now, they have the option to open it directly from where they find it, making AFP just a little more user-friendly. It’s not a huge step, but it is a part of our journey to a better, stronger, more flexible AFP.
When I think about AFP’s potential, I often think of ways it can be made more flexible and more accessible. That extends to the Consortium’s work on metadata tagging, support for a wider variety of use cases, and so on. But it also is evident in small, quality-of-life changes. Recently, we made one such change: registering AFP media types with IANA.
IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, handles a variety of duties, including management and assignment of top-level domains, coordination of global IP addresses and AS numbers, and, most importantly to our discussion here, maintaining a database of protocols for various Media Types.
Media Type, formerly known as MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) type, is a way of identifying files according to their nature and format. When you try to open a file with a strange extension, your computer consults the Media Type registry for “advice” on what to do with it.
Now that AFP extensions have been registered with IANA, when a user receives or finds an AFP file, they can simply attempt to open it. That will produce a dialog box providing the option to consult the Media Type database or select from a list of already-installed programs. Once an appropriate program is installed and associated with the file extension, opening the file in the appropriate program works just as quickly and intuitively as opening a .doc with Microsoft Word installed.
This may not sound like much, but without Media Type registration, AFP users in the past have had to manually open the appropriate program and then go through its interface to hunt down and open the file. Now, they have the option to open it directly from where they find it, making AFP just a little more user-friendly. It’s not a huge step, but it is a part of our journey to a better, stronger, more flexible AFP.
