<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"/> <meta content="pandoc" name="generator"/> <meta content="Zhiming Wang" name="author"/> <meta content="2016-01-14T01:02:52-08:00" name="date"/> <title>The dirtiest mistakes of OS X</title> <link href="/img/apple-touch-icon-152.png" rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed"/> <meta content="#FFFFFF" name="msapplication-TileColor"/> <meta content="/img/favicon-144.png" name="msapplication-TileImage"/> <meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" name="viewport"/> <link href="/css/normalize.min.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> <link href="/css/theme.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> </head> <body> <div id="archival-notice">This blog has been archived.<br/>Visit my home page at <a href="https://zhimingwang.org">zhimingwang.org</a>.</div> <nav class="nav"> <a class="nav-icon" href="/" title="Home"><!--blog icon--></a> <a class="nav-title" href="/"><!--blog title--></a> <a class="nav-author" href="https://github.com/zmwangx" target="_blank"><!--blog author--></a> </nav> <article class="content"> <header class="article-header"> <h1 class="article-title">The dirtiest mistakes of OS X</h1> <div class="article-metadata"> <time class="article-timestamp" datetime="2016-01-14T01:02:52-08:00">January 14, 2016</time> </div> </header> <p>I must have written about this elsewhere, but here are my top three:</p> <ol style="list-style-type: decimal"> <li><p><code>.DS_Store</code>. Finder litters faster than one could clean up.</p></li> <li><p>HFS+ NFD*.<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn1" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a> Heard of the cursed encoding <code>UTF8-MAC</code>? Pure Evil. Culprit of tons of garbled text issues (especially cross platform ones) and probably most length miscalculation issues. Even Apple's Terminal.app can't do NFD right. I wonder how Korean users navigate their filesystems in terminal.</p></li> <li><p>Plist XML. It's XML, but even worse.</p></li> </ol> <div class="footnotes"> <hr/> <ol> <li id="fn1"><p>NFD with an asterisk, i.e., not even NFD. According to Apple in <a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/qa/qa1173/_index.html">an old Technical Q&A</a>,</p> <blockquote> <p>The terms used in this Q&A, precomposed and decomposed, roughly correspond to Unicode Normal Forms C and D, respectively. However, most volume formats do not follow the exact specification for these normal forms. For example, HFS Plus (Mac OS Extended) uses a variant of Normal Form D in which U+2000 through U+2FFF, U+F900 through U+FAFF, and U+2F800 through U+2FAFF are not decomposed (this avoids problems with round trip conversions from old Mac text encodings). It's likely that your volume format has similar oddities.</p> </blockquote> <p>They are conscious enough to call these oddities.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref1">↩︎</a></p></li> </ol> </div> </article> <hr class="content-separator"/> <footer class="footer"> <span class="rfooter"> <a class="rss-icon" href="/rss.xml" target="_blank" title="RSS feed"><!--RSS feed icon--></a><a class="atom-icon" href="/atom.xml" target="_blank" title="Atom feed"><!--Atom feed icon--></a><a class="cc-icon" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank" title="Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license."><!--CC icon--></a> <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx" target="_blank">Zhiming Wang</a> </span> </footer> </body> </html>