Icons of program

[tom mystery antar com (tom)]

   Matt Kimball wrote:

[icons and metainfo in files]
 MK> Let me say that I really like this idea, and I think it is the best
 MK> one I have seen so far, but it will require a lot of work to map
 MK> meta-information onto existing file formats.  One mapping for ELF
 MK> files, another for script files, another for files based on IFF file

not only that, i also consider it overly redundant. let's face it: the icon and
information for 90% of your files will be the same. you will have five icons
for the five text formats you use, half a dozen for different graphics formats
and maybe twice as many for other document types.
the metainformation about which application to use to view or edit a file of
the given type will also be the same, or expressable in regular expressions if
there are exceptions. you don't really want to store the information "this is a
gif file, load xv to view it and gimp to edit it" in *every* damn gif, do you?

the only files that will have individual icons on a regular basis will be
executables. they will also be the only files that have vastly different
metainformations.


however, the main point is this:
 MK> But it would be really nice to have the information embedded in the
 MK> files, especially if we have a new GNOME structured data format which
 MK> we can use to derive new file formats from.  (Someone writes a word
 MK> processor, and the native document format would be a particular
 MK> instance of GNOME structured data.  Someone else writes a GNOME
 MK> spreadsheet, and it saves its information in GNOME structured format.
 MK> Suddenly all of the data files associated with GNOME applications can
 MK> easily store meta information embedded in the file, in the same way,
 MK> and retain the metainformation when they are moved, copied or
 MK> transferred across the network).
you are trying to impose on *every* application that exists or will ever exist
that its data has to follow certain guidelines if it wants to take advantage of
these features. how many thousands of existing applications do you plan to
rewrite?


i see the point for metainformation in elf files. but it makes less than no
sense in almost every other type of file, on the contrary, it would do a huge
damage to both gnome and the affected applications.