Re: File selector talk writeup

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 09:06:45PM -0500, Ettore wrote:
> 
> * Addition of simple controls
> 
>   For example, we could lock down what kinds of controls are allowed
>   go there and add specific interfaces for them, without allowing any
>   further customization.  Right now I can only think of two: "open
>   read only" (for the open dialog) and "save in format X" (for the
>   save dialog).  I'd like the API to have explicit calls to handle
>   these cases, but no fancy do-it-yourself hooks.

Those cases are definitely necessary, but I'd like to see a bit more
flexibility than that.  Loading some formats requires complex user
input.  Things like Gnumeric's text import guru.  These make sense
to have as secondary dialogs that popup once the file selector goes
down.  However, in other cases all the user needs or wants to
specify will be something like encoding.  An example would be CSV
(text based comma seperated values).  Popping up an entire dialog to
ask this seems like overkill.  Having or allowing an encoding option
menu/combo in the dialog would be nice.

>   - MIME types.  How is a GtkFileChooserSimple going to know about the
>     file types?  Adding something to do MIME type recognition in GTK
>     doesn't sound fun nor good.

Mime support does not sound fun.  However, given the prevalence of
suffix based file typing it would be useful to support extension
handling so that a user can specify
    SaveAs (name = "foo", type="Ms Excel") and generate foo.xls

I think we'd be better off doing this centrally than replicating it.