Re: Mime Type Analysis

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

I had a couple of things to add after reading over the Desktop Entry
Standard. First of all, this thing looks great! With a bit of
revision, and placing it under the auspices of freedesktop.org, it
could be way better than the .application files we are using for
Nautilus right now. In retrospect, inventing a file format for that
was a bad decision.

I also thought of a couple of other technical issues while reading
over this standard:

* Icons - with the advent of Nautilus, GNOME has the possibility of
  multiple icons for a mime type at different sizes, in AA and non-AA
  versions, and with possible state modifiers, such as a special
  folder for open icons. Nautilus can also support SVG icons and we
  hope to make that support gnome-wide. The solution I'd propose is to
  standardize on storing the name of a 48x48 non-AA PNG icon in the
  file for the mime type, and construct the names of possible
  alternate versions from that systematically.

* URI Schemes - GNOME has a virtual file system which will soon be
  used pervasively; this means that many apps will have the ability to
  open various URIs. I'd like applications to have a
  SupportedURISchemes field or the like (netscape would probably list
  `http:', `ftp:', `file:', etc; a mail client might list `mailto:',
  etc; we might also need a special value to represent "any URI scheme
  that gnome-vfs understands", since this is extensible by installing
  new gnome-vfs modules so apps can't be expected to know all the URI
  schemes they support at install time). This requires working out
  whether both the URI scheme and the mime type must be matched, or
  just the URI scheme and the mime type is irrelevant (as for
  `mailto:'). It may also be useful to have special icons to represent
  URI schemes in case we have links to them or visit them, either to
  avoid remote mime sniffing, because the URI has no assiciated mime
  type at all (as with `mailto:'), or because it would make the UI
  look nicer in that particular instance, so we ought to have
  URIScheme desktop files in addition to application and mime type
  ones.

* Nonstandard MIME types - should we try to standardize on this cross
  desktop? For instance, gnome-vfs has types of x-directory/normal,
  x-directory/webdav, x-special/device-block, x-special/device-char
  and the like.


Regards, 

Maciej