Desktop Entry Standard Comments

[Jonathan Blandford]

Heinrich Wendel <sysop at heinospage.de> writes:

> Hi :)
> 
> I read the now two years old Desktop Enty Standard and have some proposals to 
> change. The first thing I noticed is that the latest sgml version is 0.9.3 
> but the HTML and PS Version are only 0.9.2 this was a bit confusing, because 
> I found some entries in the kde .desktop files, which weren't present in the 
> specification.

It'd be good to fix the KDE .desktop files if they're broken.  You
should probably file a bug with their bug-tracking system.

> So lets get startet. At first I would drop all items that are marked 
> deprecated, although that's not really necessary, a validation-tool shouldn't 
> tolerate this.

Why?  There are a lot of desktop entries out there that still use the
old system.  Given the slow-moving nature of this spec, I don't see a
pressing need to get rid of them so long as the tools used in
creating/validating them warn about deprecated and non-standard tags.

> I don't understand why there is the "Encoding" option. Nearly all .desktop 
> files I've seen use Enconding=UTF-8. Are there any characters in the locale 
> Encodings that can't be displayed by UTF-8?

The other possible encoding is 'Legacy-Mixed', where the locale
determines the encoding of a line.  This has been deprecated.

> Next I would redesign the "Standard Keys"-table so it's more clear which key 
> can be used in which "Type".

In the spec?  Do you want to send a patch?

> At last I would also drop the complete MimeType Section as it seem that a new 
> standard for this will be established.

The standard may yet use this section.  Still, putting a comment in the
spec stating that this is subject to discussion would probably be smart.

Thanks,
-Jonathan