|
MacBinary is a file format that combines the two ''forks'' of a traditional Mac OS file into a single file, along with HFS's extended metadata. The resulting file is suitable for transmission over FTP, the World Wide Web, and electronic mail. The documents can also be stored on computers that run operating systems with no HFS support, such as Unix or Windows. MacBinary was widely supported on the Macintosh and was built in to most communications programs on that platform. Similar solutions were built into most data compression applications on the Mac, and although these did not require MacBinary to survive transmission across non-Mac systems, MacBinary was often added in these cases to preserve longer filenames and other features. The dual-fork nature of the HFS system was not used on Mac OS X, and MacBinary has largely disappeared. ==Description== In contrast to other computers of the era, Macintosh applications included both computer code as well as a large number of ''resources'' that were used by the operating system (OS) itself. These resources were also widely used in documents to store rich media like sounds and images. However, the resource system had the significant limitation that the maximum size of any single resource was only 32 kB, far too small for storing document data. To address this, Apple introduced the concept of ''forks'', allowing any file in the filesystem to have both a resource fork and a data fork, basically separate files. The OS would ensure the two separate files were always treated as a single object, so dragging it to a floppy disk in the Finder would actually copy both files. This presented a serious problem when the file had to be stored on other computer systems. Those systems, unaware of the fork concept, would have to store the two forks as separate files. This presented the possibility that the two would be separated at some point, or not properly recombined when they were transmitted back to the Mac. This problem led to a number of solutions that combined the two forks together into a single file, and then automatically pulling them back apart when they reached another Mac. MacBinary was one of the most popular solutions, although BinHex was also used on the UseNet, where links were not 8-bit clean. Apple's own solutions, AppleSingle and AppleDouble, was never widely adopted in the user community. Files encoded with MacBinary, regardless of the version, usually have a .bin or .macbin file extension appended to the ends of their filenames. E-mail programs such as Eudora can extract and decode MacBinary mail messages. Most dedicated FTP programs for the Mac, such as Fetch and Transmit, transparently decode MacBinary files they download. MacBinary is similar to BinHex, but MacBinary produces binary files as opposed to ASCII text. Thus, MacBinary files take up less disk space than BinHex files, but older applications and servers are more likely to corrupt them. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「MacBinary」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|