If you use a Mac, you may have at some point saved a pointer to an interesting page by dragging its ‘favicon’ (the little icon that sits to the left of a page’s URL in the URL bar in most browsers) to the Finder, which creates a neat little file.

I’d also been doing this, and blindly assumed that the files created in the Finder were standard “.url” files — basically nothing but an ASCII text file containing the page’s address. However, they’re not.

As a quick peek in the Get Info window will show you, they’re actually .webloc files. They’re actually somewhat more complex than basic .url’s.

For starters, the data is XML, formatted as a “PLIST” (one of Apple’s favorite XML schemas). The .webloc file for “http://kadin.sdf-us.org” is shown below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
    "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>URL</key>
        <string>http://kadin.sdf-us.org/</string>
</dict>
</plist>

This is the case in Mac OS 10.4, at least. With previous versions of the OS, it seems that the URL data might have been contained in the file’s resource fork instead, or in addition to, the XML PLIST.

Although normally I’d berate Apple here for ignoring an established de facto standard (the .url file) that works well, the .webloc format is interesting, because it’s easily extended. You could, for instance, encapsulate not just the URL of a page, but its entire HTML contents, or an MD5 hash, into the .webloc, if you wanted to. And, of course, it’s UTF-8 rather than ASCII (and it makes it clear that it’s UTF-8, rather than leaving the determination up to the user’s application), so it has obvious localization advantages.