taking a stab at this

["Shahms E. King" <shahms shahms com>]

This is my first attempt at getting automatic chaining to work and is
only the first piece.  This patch changes set_uri_element to optionally
expand filename mime-types into methods and return that URI.  It is
disabled via a define at the moment because, well, it breaks things for
directories named .tar.gz, .tar, .tar.bz2, and .zip

The next step, I would think, would be getting the gnome-vfs-ops to do
some verification of the URI and if either the mime-type isn't what it's
supposed to be or if the last non-mime method is *really* a directory,
to remove those parts of the path element.  Yes, it requires stats,
however, adding an is_local on the toplevel uri and only enabling the
mime expansion for local files would mean you'd only need to double
check for local files as well.  Anyway, I'm not looking to get this
included, merely posting for comments on the approach.  I know there are
some rough pieces (the hardcoded mime-type methods, for one, and the
fact that a similar function will have to be implemented in
gnome-vfs-ops, rather than sharing a common mime backend for this data,
etc.)

--Shahms

P.S. This seems to work on my home machine, however, the tar method
doesn't seem to work (on any files, even when explicitly listed), I'll
test the patch out tomorrow at work where somefile.tar.bz2#bzip2:/#tar:/
actually works.