@BLUEFROGweb Comments are perfectly safe. They've been part of the Finder's AppleScript API since before OS X. Pain to work with, though.
@BLUEFROGweb It might work fine, it might corrupt the index, it might not preserve those attributes, or index them reliably. We don't know.
@BLUEFROGweb Open Meta is writing data into an area reserved by Apple. Spotlight's behavior with custom metadata keys is undefined.
@cparnot Open Meta seems to have the same pros/cons as Tags. Misleading that they describe it as not doing anything secret. Ugly API. 10.5+.
@ctp And also immutable...
@rentzsch Yes, let's.
@ctp It would understand standard formats like UTF-8 and plist, and your app would declare a schema with what it should expect.
@rentzsch It's not necessarily just a namespace problem, since Spotlight's behavior is undefined when encountering unknown attributes...
@rentzsch If it's searchable by Spotlight but not in the comments field, it must be using a com.apple xattr key. I don't call that Safe.
@rentzsch Which standard metadata is it using?