Re: Icons of program

[Matt Kimball <mkimball xmission com>]

On Wed, Apr 22, 1998 at 06:31:44PM -0000, Russell Nelson wrote:
> 5) icon information embedded in the file.
<advantages snipped>
> ------------- (it's a big minus) files which need per-file info must
>               embed that information into the file.  Works fine for
>               any file format that permits comments.  Loses for all
>               others, or or files that don't have a magic number or
>               extension.

Let me say that I really like this idea, and I think it is the best
one I have seen so far, but it will require a lot of work to map
meta-information onto existing file formats.  One mapping for ELF
files, another for script files, another for files based on IFF file
formats, others for other formats.  But it could certainly be done.
Especially with some sort of interface to create GNOME
meta-information mappings as GNOME plug-ins.  (To be distributed with
applications that use that file format, naturally).

But it would be really nice to have the information embedded in the
files, especially if we have a new GNOME structured data format which
we can use to derive new file formats from.  (Someone writes a word
processor, and the native document format would be a particular
instance of GNOME structured data.  Someone else writes a GNOME
spreadsheet, and it saves its information in GNOME structured format.
Suddenly all of the data files associated with GNOME applications can
easily store meta information embedded in the file, in the same way,
and retain the metainformation when they are moved, copied or
transferred across the network).

-- 
Matt Kimball
mkimball@xmission.com