Re: [Usability] An Attempt at tasks for the FOSD

[Julien Olivier <julo altern org>]

On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 18:27, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Julien Olivier wrote:
> 
> > Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2003 14:24:30 +0100
> > From: Julien Olivier <julo altern org>
> > To: Dave Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>
> > Cc: Mark Finlay <sisob tuxfamily org>, usability gnome org,
> >      gtk-devel-list gnome org, hp redhat com
> > Subject: Re: [Usability] An Attempt at tasks for the FOSD
> >
> > > Ocasional by Many (Suggested, more clicks)
> > > > * Add a folder to the list of frequent folders
> > > > * Create a new folder
> > > > * Change settings specific to the file type being used
> > > Suggested addition: Toggle whether the filename extension should be
> > > hidden or shown.  I believe it should be supplied automatically, in
> > > either case.  I believe that the default should be "hidden".
> >
> > Excuse me if I'm wrong but does GNOME use file extensions at all ? i
> 
> Yes.
> 
> It is faster for Nautilus to detect by file extension, I believe this is
> the default option.
> 
> Opening from within a program must be more reliable and really does need
> to check more than just the file extension.  If a user has
> specifically opened up the application they want the application should do
> its very best to open whatever file is thrown at it.
> 

OK, I see. Thanks for enlightening me :)

> > So, my suggestion is to show the "extension" and not to allow to hide it
> 
> The reason to hide the extension is that extensions make it slighly more
> awkward to make minor changes to filenames.
> Good auto completion and treating '.' as a delimeter/token for easy
> keyboard navigation with the arrow keys would somewhat reduce the problem.
> 
> Microsoft also have the problem of hidden file extensions allowing users
> to be misled into executing malicious files, but I'm sure there is a smart
> way to solve this.
> 

Maybe the smartest way to manage this would be to:
 - get the MIME-Type from the file (image/JPEG for example)
 - get a list of extensions expected to match this file-type (".jpg",
".jpeg", ".JPG", ".JPEG")
 - remove the extension only if the real extension matches one of the
expected extensions

Of course, that would involve to have a list of known extensions for
each MIME-Type and it might be quite slow on big amount of data. But
that would have the advantage to avoid files like "sexygirl.jpg.sh" to
be launched by mistake :)

> - Alan H.
> 
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