Re: [Usability]Mime type to application associations.

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

To put this in a nutshell: the current system is a bit of a mess, and
everyone knows it, but it won't be solved until (1) someone has a lot
more time to write code and (2) we come up with a solution that ideally
can be shared at freedesktop.org. That's not to knock your suggestions
(some of which are quite good and many of which have been discussed in
some form or another) but don't expect any traction unless you or
someone else sits down and writes the code.

Luis

On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 21:19, Mathew Johnston wrote:
> I'm really having trouble understanding the mime type to application
> association scheme that Gnome uses. This is a major usability issue for
> me.
> 
> First, I'll give my expectations.
> 
> A file has a content type; the type may be a mime type (example,
> "application/x-dia-diagram") or gnome type category (example,
> "Documents/Diagram/Dia diagram"). Whatever it is, it is a classification
> of what type a file is. Type could be determined through magic numbers,
> extention, or some information provided through protocol (HTTP
> Content-type header, extended filesystem information, etc). 
> 
> Content types would either point to applications or applications would
> point to content types.  Associations between apps and types would be
> many to many. I think that applications pointing to content types makes
> more sense; it's more managable too.
> 
> Right now, I don't know how in the hell all of these applications get
> associated with my file types and I have no way of controling it (how
> did gedit, NEdit, vi, etc all get associated with Plain text type
> files?)
> 
> Here's my vision:
> 
> Applications would be defined and registered centrally; this
> registration could be used to populate menus, etc. An interface would be
> provided to manually register applications, easily (for non compliant
> apps or for scripts). Compliant applications would register upon
> execution, if they are not already registered. The application would
> also mention to the system which file types it is capable of dealing
> with as well as how it is capable of dealing with the types (view, edit,
> compress, uncompress, etc); types would be referenced by pattern, so
> that an application could say, "I can compress any file", or, "I can
> edit any text file". Users should also be able to add extra types for an
> application to support. One application and action could be associated
> with a specific type as the default action (for double clicking). 
> 
> Does that not make sense? This would also be fairly straight forward to
> implement from an interface perspective and it should be easy to explain
> to new users (you install a new app that knows that it can do certain
> things with certain file types and then the system picks up on that and
> makes it easy for you to get to the apps).
> 
> Thanks,
> Mat.
> 
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