RE: proposal for MIME behavior in GNOME

[Lucian Gabor <luciangabor yahoo co uk>]

I wrote another mail on this thread regarding those issues. I'll try to
respond without much overlapping. 

On Sat, 2003-12-06 at 17:33, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> Lucian Gabor wrote:
> > Ain't nobody interested in maintaining the possibility to 
> > hide applications from the context menu
> 
> If an application does not register itself as being able to open the file
> type, then you won't see it. I can't imagine why a user would need to keep
> an application off the context menu. But he could still do it by changing
> the associations as Jonathan's document suggests.

I know that's true. But if there are a lot of applications associated
with that mime type we will get a menu for _all_ of them. I suggested
the possibility to hide some of them. Here is an concrete example:

for text/html we have the following associated applications:
	browsers 		- epiphany and mozilla (mozilla is a 				dependency for
epiphany so if you don't 				get rid of .desktop or/and .applications
				file for mozilla you are stuck with it)
	text browsers 		- lynx, links
	miscellaneous browsers 	- htmlview
	ides 			- screem, bluefish, mozilla editor
	text editors 		- gedit, emacs, gvim, vi ...
	xml editors 		- mlview, conglomerate
Since there are more then 4 we will get an alphabetically sorted menu
with all of them and locating one of them will be quite annoying.
	
With current gnome mime handling there is no such problem. 
I understood that gnome developers need to fix/simplify the way a user
selects a default application but does this get to a better usability?

The probability that an corporate desktop user might use any other
application beside the default one is quite small in this case. He/she
would probably be more satisfied without any other application listed in
the context menu. But that might not be true for other mime types. I
can't think of an concrete example but I'll invent one: lets say that
the company uses some xml format for their data. He could edit them with
a specialised application and (fore some good reason) he might need
another application to do some processing of that file. In this invented
case he probably would need only those applications in the menu, but he
would get the text and xml editors and also some browsers. Please don't
comment on the qualities of this example, maybe only on the possibility
that it might happen.

Talking about the first example again wouldn't be better if gnome could
provide easy access by default to one application for each category?
Something like:
	open with web browser (that would be the default)
	Choose action > Edit as web page
			Edit as xhtml
			Edit as text

This could be done if an .desktop file could provide information about
what it can do with each mime type - view, edit, print, _specialised_

I wrote in the previous post on how to customise this menu.

>  
> > or in maintaining the 
> > possibility to use a different default application to open a 
> > specific file?
> 
> Again, see "Change Default Application for a MIME-type" in Jonathan's
> document.
> 

I was talking about having nautilus as the default handler for
inode/directory, but a different handler for My Photos folder (gthumb).

> > Also what about the possibility to easily 
> > change the default viewer for all image files or for all video files?
> 
> I guess that would mean setting the default application for a group of MIME
> types all at once, where the application says that it can open that MIME
> type. I guess that might be useful. It would not need to be in the same UI.
> 

There already is such an option for text files in "Preferred
Applications".

> Murray Cumming
> www.murrayc.com
> murrayc usa net
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