Editing MacBinary (section)

==Description==
In contrast to other computers of the era, [[Macintosh]] applications included both computer code as well as a large number of ''resources'' that were used by the [[operating system]] (OS) itself. These resources were also widely used in documents to store [[rich media]] like sounds and images. However, the resource system had the significant limitation that the maximum size of any single resource was only 32 kB, far too small for storing document data. To address this, Apple introduced the concept of ''forks'', allowing any file in the filesystem to have both a resource fork and a data fork. Physically these were separate files, but the OS would ensure the two separate files were always treated as a single object, so dragging it to a [[floppy disk]] in the [[Finder (software)|Finder]] would copy both forks.

This presented a serious problem when the file had to be stored on other computer systems. Those systems, unaware of the fork concept, would have to store the two forks as separate files. This presented the possibility that the two would be separated at some point, or not properly recombined when they were transmitted back to the Mac. This problem led to a number of solutions that combined the two forks together into a single file, and then automatically pulling them back apart when they reached another Mac. MacBinary was one of the most popular solutions, although [[BinHex]] was also used on [[UseNet]], where data transfer was not [[8-bit clean]]. Apple's own solutions, [[AppleSingle and AppleDouble formats| AppleSingle and AppleDouble]], were never widely adopted in the user community.

Files encoded with MacBinary, regardless of the version, usually have a '''.bin''' or '''.macbin''' [[file extension]] appended to the ends of their filenames.  E-mail programs such as [[Eudora (e-mail client)|Eudora]] can extract and decode MacBinary mail messages. Most dedicated FTP programs for the Mac, such as [[Fetch (FTP client)|Fetch]] and [[Transmit (FTP client)|Transmit]], transparently decode MacBinary files they download.

MacBinary is similar to [[BinHex]], but MacBinary produces [[binary file]]s as opposed to [[ASCII]] text.  Thus, MacBinary files are smaller than BinHex files, but older applications and servers are more likely to corrupt them.