Posted at 09:45 pm by Ivan Mironchuk
I don’t want to go too broadly in this blog on the history, theory, or meaning of file-naming conventions, but for as long as the computer has been around, filenames have been the quickest and easiest way of identifying a document’s contents, or what an image is a picture of.
This may be true, but consider how many times you have seen files like the ones pictured below:
These filenames don’t do much to convey what they actually are. Yes we know that the BusinessPlan.doc file probably contains some sort of business plan, and the logo.jpg file is probably a logo for some company, but that’s it, nothing else. We’d have to open each of these files to really know what they are.
Naming conventions are supposed to solve this problem. Wether you use your own, or you work for a company or organization, chances are you are using some sort of naming convention to help organize files and folders and to help facilitate searching.
But what happens when naming conventions are too simple or too complex? Because a filename can only contain a limited amount of characters, we have to resort to coding or abbreviating parts of a filename so that we can fit in more information. To people within our company or organization these filenames will make sense, because we are all using the same naming convention, but to anyone external these filenames may make no sense at all.
Is putting a date on a filename redundant, considering that you can almost always display a modification date when browsing files?
Continues @ http://www.databasepublish.com