Re: BonoboPreview initiative - png in a control

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Chris Phelps <chicane reninet com> writes:
> > Ok, so to refocus the topic here -> No thumbnailing will be done...that
> > is complete crack and everyone ought to know it.
> 
> I don't really agree - saving a preview in image form would be more
> robust and more efficient, IMO. Opening a component to render a
> spreadsheet would mean essentially loading all of Gnumeric, which is
> just going to be too slow and high-overhead for a file selector, and
> also means that looking at a file means executing it, so you would
> need Gnumeric in some sort of sandbox mode - it's all a big can of
> worms.  Moreover you can't do it if you don't have Gnumeric installed
> and are e.g. looking at a file someone sent you.
> 
> I don't think a preview mechanism is the same as thumbnailing; the
> thumbnailing spec is just about how to cache previews to be displayed
> in Nautilus or a file selector, i.e. it's a caching mechanism. The
> preview mechanism is about how to generate the thumbnail in the first
> place, and isn't covered in the thumbnailing spec.
> 
> Right now we have an "ad hoc" preview mechanism, which is that
> Nautilus knows how to generate previews for many kinds of file
> (images, text files, etc.). So it might be nice to have a way to get a
> preview-generating component for different sorts of file. But I would
> hope that most of those components would extract a pre-saved image
> from the file. That is, say Gnumeric would make a preview image and
> save that inside the XML file in some way. Then its preview component
> would just open the XML file and yank out the relevant part and pass
> it back as an image. The thumbnailing spec would then be used by
> Nautilus, Konqueror, or file selector to cache that image.
> 
> The thumbnail caching allows us to have expensive preview components
> when required, but it'd still be nice to make preview-generation as
> cheap and robust as it possibly can be.
> 
> Anyway, I see no reason to have interactive previews, ergo previews
> are just images, which can be cached using the thumbnail spec, and
> previews may as well be displayed as images as well, and the
> preview-generator components kept simple by returning images.
> 
> That will be fast, robust, easy to implement, and a perfectly good UI.

But inaccessible.  Can't we at least add descriptive text?  If we are
attaching, in effect, image data to files, I think we should attach
descriptive text as well.

> .02,
> Havoc
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