title: Third-party Uniform Type Identifier implementations?
body: <p>The madness of file extensions and MIME types and creator codes and magic numbers to determine file types is a huge mess. Coming from a background of Cocoa programming, I supposed I'm spoiled: in Tiger, OS X added a system called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Type_Identifier" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Uniform Type Identifiers</a> (UTIs) that makes the entire process sane.</p>
  
  <p>Given that I'm doing a bunch of web development in (insert your favorite web development environment here), is there anything similar that's not dependent on running OS X and - better yet - works in multiple programming languages?</p>
  
  <p>Right now, I'm using the <code>file</code> command on Linux to replicate some of the functionality, but it's just not the same. And, of course, everybody has their <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_mime.html#typesconfig" rel="nofollow noreferrer">huge lookup tables</a>, but nothing is centralized.</p>
  
  <p>Has anybody done this or run across this before?</p>