mime-type/application association spec

[Heinrich Wendel]

On Tuesday 10 June 2003 13:11, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since there didn't seem to have much activity to write a doc specifying
> how mime-type/application associations could be handled in a
> cross-desktop way, I decided to give a try at such a spec. Attached to
> this email, you'll find a rough draft describing one possible way of
> doing that. Keep in mind that it's a very preliminary draft whose main
> goal is to start a discussion.

Yes, there seems now to be a format for the mime-types but not how to 
associated applications to mime-types. I suppose to do it similar like KDE 
does it. The MimeType Key is alreay in the Desktop specification, so we have 
no problems here.

can_open_multiple_file: Why do we need that? Take a look at the exec 
parameters you have %f, a single file name, and %F an list of files names.

uses_gnome_vfs: Again why? Backward compatibility?

supported_uris: Interesting topic to think about, but I don't think it has to 
be in this specification, mainly this uris are all opened by 
nautilus/konqueror, so we should think about a specification for this uris, 
but not to add them to this standard.

>Store all mime types in a single file (efficiency reasons => 
>multiple files = 50% slower (according to my totally unscientific tests))
Maybe it's faster, but it's difficulter to maintain, so I think we do not need 
this file at all. The priority is done via the InitialPreference Parameter I 
think.

So all in all I would propose to standarize the KDE extensions to the .desktop 
format. But why standarize them, they are already standard, but this is not 
widely known ;D

> There are probably many problems I didn't think about, it only talks
> about GNOME specific stuff since I don't know how this problem is
> handled in other desktop environments. However, I took various idea from
> posts on this mailing list, so some parts of this document are probably
> quite similar to what KDE is currently doing.



>
> So here is the document (it's also available from
> http://cfergeau.free.fr/mime-spec.txt), any comment is welcome,
>
> Christophe
mfg, Heinrich :)