MIME type detection

[Johan Ersvik <jersvik fastmail fm>]

I have stumbled upon a problem with realmedia files. The MIME type is
correctly identified by 'gnomevfs-info myfile.rm', however it's
identified as "text/plain" when the -s switch is used. Presumably
because it just contains a link. This causes nautilus to display it as a
very dull and boring text file (after i clicked on it that is), and it
can't open it since the content seems to conflict with the extension. I
did a little searching and found
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2006-January/msg00043.html

The given solution seems to be to mark the MIME type
(application/bluefish in that case) as a subtype to "text/plain". Still,
freedesktop.org.xml (of shared-mime-info spec) does not have realmedia
be text/plain subtypes. And it couldn't since those realmedia files can
contain either contain a link or something else.

Sure, the ability to identify text files with no or strange extensions
is great. (I wonder how this is done, there are no matching rule for
this in freedesktop.org.xml that I've seen. Is text/plain a special case
in gnome-vfs?) Maybe it just shouldn't have precedence in this way.

Hope to inspire a discussion :)
Cheers,
Johan