Post #302651

Some of you might be thinking: Isn't this what extended attributes are for? Maybe, but they don't do it well. How do you manage tags that can be arbitrary unicode strings without stepping into escape character hell? And incompatibility between programs doing the escaping? Let's say: "gray fur", "green eyes", "cat", "'Live, laugh, love' banner" as elements present in an image. This is a relatively trivial example with only common ASCII characters, spaces, quotes and commas. It gets worse. Extended attributes cannot suffice as they do not provide adequate facilities for structured metadata. Can I name a system that did it properly? Yeah, BTRON apparently did (for all its many other limitations).