[mime-info database] inode types

[David Faure]

On Saturday 23 August 2003 22:51, Jaap Karssenberg wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> It seems to me that the shared mime-info database lacks a mime type
> "inode/file", I think it should exist. Now it may seem useless because
> determining a more detailed mimetype then 'inode/file' is the whole
> point of the mime-info database, but it could be usefull for a program
> to determine the "inode-type" of a node and describe it in terms of
> mime-types. Also it would simply be more logical to have a complete set
> of inode types then to have an incomplete set.

Makes sense. One could even make all mimetypes for files inherit from
inode/file (implicitly or explicitely)!
This would allow to associate an app or action with all files (e.g. "gzip this file"),
which is what we currently use all/allfiles in KDE for, but a base
inode/file would be much better and cleaner (no need for special cases all/*).
Thanks a lot for providing me with a new argument about why we need
mimetype inheritance in the spec.

(On that subject I have another example: an OpenOffice or KOffice document
is a ZIP file, and also a more specific mimetype - so application/vnd.sun.xml.writer
should inherit from application/x-zip...)

> One could also argue that when the 'inode/file' type exist this should
> be the default instead of 'text/plain', because it is a more accurate
> description for a file without a determined mime-type. It seems to me
> that the default 'text/plain' is quite arbitrary and that the choice of
> the default mimetype can be application dependant. For example a media
> player could use something like 'video/mpeg' as default while a browser
> might default to 'text/html'.
Does it say anywhere that text/plain is the default!?!?
I thought the default for "unknown mimetype" was generally
application/octet-stream.

-- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).