#Workbench for novices
No, the "resource fork" of Mac files is not necessary for icon
information. It is perfectly possible to do the same things without using
such things as two distinct forks to a file.
You comments about Apple restricting peoples attempts to get to the innards
of the machine have me lost. Apple does no such thing–its just that
programs that don't adhere to the Mac interface don't sell, the user
community won't buy such programs.
Of course, there is no such problem on the Amiga, nor am I advocating the
adoption of such principles. I'm mere drawing upon experience from several
other systems (the Mac being just one of them) to suggest a method that
works quite well in having an icon based user interface that wouldn't get
in the way of CLI based users and would use considerably less memory than
(er, disk space) than the current ".info" method.