What we intend to do is (1) build an Internet registry of magic number
patterns based on Unix's /etc/magic, (2) build a support library for
programs which wish to be magic-number-aware, (3) issue an RFC describing the
Registry and the library and promulgating standards for picking magic numbers,
and also (4) describing how conformant programs can treat the Internet as
a semantically-typed file store. (This would include the kind of
application behavior many people on the list have been discussing.)
The Magic Numbers project was directly inspired by an earlier remark
in the "file types" thread. Interested parties should send me a
request to join the magic-numbers mailing list.
-- <a href="http://www.ccil.org/~esr/home.html">Eric S. Raymond</a>