RE: proposal for MIME behavior in GNOME

[Ross Burton <ross burtonini com>]

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 09:37, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> 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.

I agree, the system looks how I've always how MIME should work.

> One question though. You say
[snip]
> 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 .

I'd say that most applications which are going to save data to XML
chunks are going to have MIME entries.  If the user doesn't have an
application which can interpret the data, gedit is as good it gets.

One thing I miss in most MIME systems is the ability to add arbitrary
actions.  The MIME system covers "opening" a file, but if arbitrary
named actions could be created when it would be trivial to have a Print
context menu action on Openoffice documents, etc.  I'm sure its far too
late for this, but if its not a terrible idea I'll approach freedesktop
about it.

Ross
-- 
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross burtonini com
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