Re: another proposal for MIME: with actions, implementators, and scores

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 10:04:54PM +0000, Lee Braiden wrote:
> 
> Files would have a prioritised list of mimetypes; not just primary and 
> others. ?This would allow better fallback and probably some other nice 
> features, simply by virtue of providing more information to the desktop 
> itself.

> Some way to prioritise applications is needed, too. ?Perhaps giving each 
> application's implementation a 'rating' would do here: a scale of (less 
> than?) -100 to (more than?) +100, with certain known milestones on the scale, 
> like -100 is NOT_IMPLEMENTED, -50 is POOR_IMPLEMENTATION, 0 is average and 
> +100 is IDEAL_IMPLEMENTATION, for example.

A nice idea, but I suspect this would get problematic.  Assigning
the scores would be fairly contensious.

An example near and dear to my heart would be Gnumeric vs OpenCalc
vs MS Excel under wine.  Each choice has its relative merits.
Choosing a ranking would depend on what's important to a user.
    Gnumeric	- fast, solid spreadsheet and analytics
    OO		- native office suite
    Excel	- The best compatibility at the expense of nativeness

How about things like filter quality.  Gnumeric has a solid core,
but our lotus 123 filter could use more bells and whistles.  Do we
list the scores on a per mime type basis ?  Or even more subtle MS
Excel's binary xls format vs their various XML formats.  Do they
even have different mime types ?

My suspicion is that there would be lots of similar situations, and
that the user wouldn't benefit much from the added complexity.