Because many applications use text, bit maps, and other binary data in extended attributes, standard names have been adopted to help identify these formats. An application is not limited to these Standard Extended Attributes but should use them when many applications will be accessing the same data.

Standard Extended Attributes (SEAs) have a dot (.) as a prefix. This identifies the extended attribute as a SEA. The leading dot is reserved, so applications should not define extended attributes that start with a dot. Also, extended attributes that start with the characters $, @, &, or + are reserved for system use.

To ensure that its extended attributes are unique, an application should use the name of the company and the name of the application (or suitable abbreviations of each) as a prefix for application-specific extended attributes.

For example, Company A has an OS/2 Application, B, that defines extended attributes STUFF, MORE_STUFF, and STILL_MORE_STUFF for its file objects. The names of these extended attributes could be represented by the following entry:

    AB.STUFF   AB.MORE_STUFF   AB.STILL_MORE_STUFF