A wonderful example of how little thought, or at least Deep Thought, goes into the creation of modern software. In order to understand this, you need to know three things:
- AOL instant messenger has an "feature" which combs through any messages sent to someone, looks for any emoticons, and horrifyingly converts them on the fly into hideous icons.
- AOL instant messenger's file transfer feature receives messages by putting up a little blue message in the window with all the IMs saying {username} wants to send file {full pathname of file} and then opening a dialog box asking if you want it.
- The Macintosh programming API and Filesystem use colons as path separators; that is to say, internally it uses colons to separate parent from child in the directory hierarchy, the way *n?x uses slashes and DOS uses backslashes.
So a while ago i was sending a file to this guy i know over AIM.
The file was sitting on my desktop.
Its name was (Portishead)scorn_backward.mp3.This was Fair Use. No flamewar please.
Its full pathname was therefore Macintosh HD:Desktop Folder:(Portishead)scorn_backward.mp3.
The guy i was sending it to does not have graphical smileys disabled yet.
When he got the message i was trying to send him the file, his copy of AIM took the "is trying to send you" message, noticed a :( between "Folder" and "Portishead", and converted that :( into a frowning graphical smiley. Right in the middle of the pathname.
I think you can draw conclusions about this by yourself. | 
