Re: [Usability]File renaming/extensions

[Daniel F Moisset <dmoisset arnet com ar>]

Some random stuff about hiding extensions:

It might be dangerous to hide extensions in cases where there are
several files with the same name and different extensions. This is quite
usual for developers, where you have foo.c, foo.h, foo.o and foo (the
last one is an executable). With extension hiding you would have four
icons labeled "foo":
    a) It's true that different icons allows recognizing different file
types in that case. But that doesn't work when you don't have icons for
some type, or it's some unrecognized mime-type (Happens all the time for
me with my .e and .hs files... I code a lot in Eiffel and Haskell. Also
happens with my .glade files; perhaps a config bug in my system). With
extension hiding I would have a very confusing time working with that
kind of files
    b) In some cases, the info you really want is the extension. That is
quite usual with Makefiles, which can be thought as having the extension
"Makefile." at the left :) I've seen (and have) several projects with
directories as this: Makefile Makefile.in Makefile.gcc Makefile.djgpp
Makefile.borland. Seeing 5 files labeled "Makefile" with makefile icons
wouldn't be very helpful here

Windows handles a) the following way: When a file extension is not
associated with an icon, it shows the default icon together with the
full name (i.e. including extension). It only hides extensions for the
file types it knows about.

One disadvantage of showing extensions:
[I've seen this one among real windows users on systems with the
extensions shown. It's not a full blown usability study but it's my
homemade one]  A lot of users associate extensions with file type when
extensions are visible. That's quite natural. The problem is that they
think that changing the extension changes the file type. I've seen
several times people that receive some weird format knowwing that it's a
picture, and when no app can open it, they slap ".jpg" at the end of the
filename and try again. I've even seen somebody changing a .db (dbase4)
to a .doc to open it with word (with not very good results, obviously). 

I think the above is a proof that using extensions for filetyping Really
Sucks(TM) [The README.it is another proof]. Nautilus should avoid trying
to be smart about extensions as little as possible. The problem is that
you can have typing information in to places (extension and content),
and they can be made inconsistent too easily.

However we live in a world with other systems and can not impose a new
standard so compatibility with extensions is a necessary evil we have to
live with. But I don't believe that any smart algorithm for deciding
when to show extensions will be useful enough to overweigh the cases
when we need the dots in the names. It's more of a design problem In the
underlying systems :(

Hope this adds something to the discussion

             D.

-- 
Knowledge, sir, should be free to all!
                -- Harry Mudd, "I, Mudd", stardate 4513.3