RE: proposal for MIME behavior in GNOME

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> I have written a proposal for handling MIME types and files 
> better in nautilus at:
> 
>  http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/mime/

It all looks wonderful to me, and, apart from the file property tab, I hope
it's how it's _supposed_ to work now.

One question though. You say
"
If the type of a file is application/octet-stream, we auto generate a type
of application/x-extension-<EXTENSION>. If the file doesn't obviously have
an extension, we use the filename. Note that only binary files will get
this. All files who's first 256 values are valid UTF-8 will be listed as
text/plain.
"

Doesn't this mean that all unknown files, which happen to be formatted as
XML, will have a primary application of gedit or similar, without the user
being aware that that is probably inappropriate. If it was a binary format
then the user would quickly see that he didn't have the necessary
application installed .

In general, I think that XML-formatted files should be opened with a
suitable application, and not edited directly unless the user requests that
explicitly. And if there's no suitable application already associated then
the user should be told that.

Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net