Re: File type determination

[Michael Imamura <zoogie lugatgt org>]

On Tue, 2003-12-30 at 08:47, Donald Henson wrote:
> I agree just so long as, at the end, the user is in control. In other
> words, the user must be able to tell Nautilus what the file type is to
> be *even if it's incorrect*. This will prevent two problems. One is the
> situation where you might want to open a file in an otherwise
> inappropriate application, for whatever reason. The other is the
> situation where Nautilus has determined an incorrect file type and
> refuses to change it.

I agree -- I'm a fan of content sniffing, but I don't believe it can
ever be *perfect*.  I still have a text file sitting on my desktop (with
a .txt extension) that Nautilus insists is an MP3 -- I really wish I
could just say to Nautilus, "No, you're wrong, just trust me on this
one!"

If this were a regular user without any knowledge of content sniffing
(or a Windows user used to extensions), then what would the user think? 
Consider especially that the user finds his/her way to the "File Types
and Properties" dialog, and sees that it contains a list of "Filename
extensions", none of which are "txt".  There is no indication (that I
can see) that Nautilus is looking into the file and ignoring the
extension.

I think that Nautilus should take both the extension and the content
into account -- content sniffing seems to work great for many "common"
file types with non-ambiguous headers, but it would be useful to at
least have the options for the file type by extension be available in
the "Open With..." menu so that I can override it on a file-by-file
basis when content sniffing fails.

-- 
Michael Imamura  zoogie lugatgt org
LUG GT Web Guy   http://lugatgt.org/