RE: proposal for MIME behavior in GNOME

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> > 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)

The mozilla _application_ will not be an epiphany dependency in future.

> 	text browsers 		- lynx, links

I don't think we'll be showing console apps in the list of applications.

> 	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.

I only think this will happen for generic types such as text and media
types, but maybe it would be useful to 
have some application categorisation. Maybe the position of the application
in the GNOME menu would be enough for this.
	
[snip]
> 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)

Hmm, this points out that it would be nice to list the "preferred
application" names in the Open With list,
So people don't need to think about strange names like mozilla or epiphany.

> 	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_

Apart from the categorisation thing I mention above, I think someone
mentioned that applications might register themselves as being able to edit
or print a file as well as being able to open it. I think Windows does this,
but I don't think it does it very well. It would be difficult to get right.

> > > 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).

I think people find file-type associations confusing enough (on all
operating systems) without having a separate file-type associations list for
every folder. 
 
> > > 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".

Yes, I was thinking that would be a good place for it.

Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net