mime-type/application mapping spec, take #2

[David Faure]

On Monday 30 June 2003 12:57, Dave Cridland [Home] wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-06-29 at 00:24, David Faure wrote:
> > For the generic handler suggestion, I suggest another solution:
> > mimetype inheritance. Has this been added to the mimetype spec? I remember
> > we talked a bit about it. It would allow to let all text-based mimetypes inherit
> > from text/plain, which would also mean they inherit its handlers.
> 
> Is this different from defining a catch-call text/* handler, or even */*
> handler? (*/* handlers are useful for, for instance, "Mail this
> content".)

Yes - application/x-perl and application/x-shellscript (for instance)
are text-based formats, so they could derive from text/plain.

Basing such things on the mimetype name (text/foo) is very unflexible.

But you're right - an end user doesn't necessarily want to end up with a 
plain text handler for e.g. text/html.
But that's only a matter of having a better (preferred) viewer for that type.

-- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
Qtella users - stability patches at http://blackie.dk/~dfaure/qtella.html