Post #302644

2026-02-15 01:36 UTC

About misattribution of art, media, data, etc, you know something that really grates on me? That there are formats that are simply incapable of containing adequate metadata and the systems meant to handle them do not compensate for it. The browser does not save the metadata regarding an artist that made a .gif art file. It does not save the metadata in the filesystem either because most filesystems suck compared to BeOS/Haiku&#39;s. It doesn&#39;t even bother to keep the metadata in a companion file &amp; manage it alongside (the most portable yet failure prone option). There are no standards for the communication of relation between data and metadata for a browser to even attempt to do this reliably or for anything else to take notice of it and keep the relation unbroken throughout custody. What the fuck are we doing?

Replies (1)

@lispi314@udongein.xyz 2026-02-15 01:46

I've actually spent a ridiculous amount of time tying this sort of thing into Emacs for my own uses. Doing something ad-hoc that should've been baked into everything from the start such that I wouldn't even have to think about it. It's okay if some things are just... generally distributed as a stripped down container that barely has enough information embedded within to know how to decode the rest of the data without having to literally start guessing. (Sometimes this means it's a <16 bytes header and then nothing but payload data, like many image formats.) But the filesystem has no such excuse. It is meant to manage files. It is meant to manage their metadata. It is failing to do so and nearly everything else likewise fails to do so using the filesystem, because everything has to be written with the assumption that filesystems are persistently broken and cannot store relevant metadata.

Open ##302650