Re: [Usability]File renaming/extensions

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 17:56, David Lazaro wrote:
> You've read my mind ;) That is exactly my intention. And we are half
> there, though. Almost all GNOME core apps slap the extension when saving
> and filter on extension when opening files. GHex and Gedit are the only
> exceptions to these rule that I can recall now.

So in fact you aren't really favoring the "no extension" approach but a
"forced extension" approach which would then hide this extension not to
confuse the user? 
Well, I cannot say that this makes any sense to me. :)
As you already said, Windows shows file extensions for many files anyway
(I think it shows it for everything but a selected few but not sure,
didn't use it long). Now think about it, in Unix we are already used to
not give our binaries and textfiles silly .exe or .txt extensions. Where
is the big difference? The only big difference I see is that in Windows,
multimedia/archive files also show no extension. Like image and music
files. 
But for those, the extensions shows a very important information: The
codec that was used to create the file and that is needed to open it. 
Maybe this case could be handled differently, not showing the file
ending but the codec on the icon (dynamically so we aren't screwed when
an icon is missing) or whatever.
However, this wouldn't change the fact that I don't want to edit the
extension when pressing F2 and there is any. =)

- Daniel