Re: [Nautilus-list] Viewing PHP files in Nautilus

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Tuesday, August 21, 2001, at 12:03  PM, D. D. Brierton wrote:

> Is this a Nautilus issue or a gnome-vfs issue? If I've posted to the
> wrong list could omeone forward this to the appropriate list and let me
> know its address?

The gnome-vfs mailing list is at gnome-vfs lists ximian com 

> Nautilus has no default viewer for PHP files, not even a text view. It
> also seems to give them the wrong mime type - they are classified as
> application/x-php whereas I think they should be
> application/x-httpd-php. (I'm using gnome-vfs 1.0.1 and nautilus 1.0.4.)

The tables that guess MIME types for local files are part of gnome-vfs. 
The entry for php says that any file with a .php, .php3, or .php4 
extension should have MIME type of application/x-php (in gnome-vfs.mime) 
and any file that has the string "<?php" near the start of the file should 
have MIME type application/x-php (in gnome-vfs-mime-magic). It's simple to 
correct that if it's wrong. If application/x-httpd-php is the correct MIME 
type, we can switch to that. I'm not sure where the existing MIME type 
came from. Where can I find some reference information that documents this 
MIME type?

Normally, MIME types for this sort of file format are text/* MIME types, 
not application/* MIME types. One example of this is text/x-perl, but 
there are tons of others. That's how text viewers know how to display 
these types. Such viewers list text/* in the list of types they know how 
to handle. This list of MIME types is contained in the ".oaf.in" (name 
changing to ".server.in" for GNOME 2) file for each viewer, so we'd have 
to go around and edit each one. If we want to, we can teach each of the 
text viewers that it can also view this type -- even though it doesn't 
have a text/* MIME type, it's actually a text file.

The simplest solution would be to define a text/* MIME type for .php files,
 since the application/* MIME types seem to be in error. This is practical 
if there's no important standard for the MIME types of .php source files 
already. But your message implies that there's an already existing 
application/x-httpd-php MIME type that is a standard that we'd benefit by 
following, so we might be out of luck.

> Would it also be possible to have a mozilla view for (at least some) php
> files? In the simplest case local files of the form:
>
> /home/user/public_html/path/to/file.php
>
> could map to:
>
> http://localhost/~user/path/to/file.php

This kind of assumption about how a local web server corresponds to the 
local file system is beyond the scope of anything Nautilus currently does.
 I don't think it's a great idea to add it, but I can see how it would be 
handy for some people, and you might want to use a script to do this from 
Nautilus. In the case of a .php file, viewing through a web server is more 
like executing the file and looking at the output than like viewing the 
file itself. I can see how for many types of CGI files, it might be nice 
to see the view of the file through the web server. This doesn't seem 
specific to .php files.

    -- Darin