It is spelled out, but buried in a completely non-intuitive place in the “spec”. The first location where the file name convention is discussed (which is where it should be spelled out) is incredibly ambiguous, leaving it up to the reader what is meant by “filename”.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say “literal minded people” thought it was unclear. In a filesystem, every file must have a unique name. The canonical path to the unique file being itself unique, such that:
is unique and different than:
despite both files being named “file.ext”. Within a particular directory path, however, one can not have two “file.ext”, therefore, saying “the filename with an extension of .xmp” is ambiguous if you have both “file.ext1” and “file.ext2”. As many here have pointed out, if you have to files with the same name but in different formats, this scenario is a possibility. However, the argument that those two files consist of one RAW and one JPG is invalid, since JPEGs store XMP data internal to the image file itself whereas RAWs do not.
A more convincing argument would be what if I had both IMG_1234.CR2 and IMG_1234.NEF. The probability is small, but not zero.
It would make perfect sense on the part of (all) application developers dealing with XMP data and reading/writing XMP data to provide a user configurable file name format option with a reasonable default.
Most applications would likely default to .xmp, but could provide the option letting the user set it to ..xmp. And if DT wants to be the odd-ball in the industry because DT knows better than everyone else, they could default to the latter, but appease those who care by allowing them to change it to the former.
If PM comes through and supports this request, but DT remains obstinate, I will think far more highly of PM as a result. One thing I’ve learned in my 30+ years involvement with the open source world is that they can at times be incredibly arrogant and stubborn, since they have no paying customers to make happy. Say what you will about proprietary software, but they will usually give the customer what they ask for if there’s money to be made by doing it.
IMO, there is no reason NOT to support the standard, even if you think it’s a stupid standard. Support the existing standard, at least with configurable options, and then show the rest of the world the better way by defaulting to what you think is right.
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Paul - Not really holding his breath for either side to give in on this :-/