

Ah, I may have misunderstood the intent behind some of your wording, my bad.
The whole issue does make me hope open standards continue to gain more adoption. One can hope, right?
Anyway, again, my apologies - it does sound like we’re kinda on the same page here after all.
Heh. Yes they’re similar, but on the technical side different in a very important way. It has to do with opening a file from inside another program. If you select a shortcut, the program with treat or as a separate file, so most of the time the action will fail. A link, though, you should end up with the program opening the target of the link. In other words, a shortcut is a file that points at a different file, where a symlink involves she filesystem trickery to accomplish almost the same thing.
That’s a horrible, just terrible explanation, though - but I’m pretty sure this is the gist of it.