Re: MIME type detection

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-08-10 at 17:09 +0200, Johan Ersvik wrote:
> 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.

It does indeed have special casing to detect textfile. That can't really
be done using the "normal" way to detect mimetypes.

I wonder if its really right to have the same mimetype for something
that is sometimes a textfile, and sometimes not though. Maybe the two
realaudio formats should have different types?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a war-weary arachnophobic matador fleeing from a secret government 
programme. She's a pregnant tempestuous widow from Mars. They fight crime!