MIME changes

[David Faure]

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On Monday 12 May 2003 15:10, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 02:33:02PM +0200, David Faure wrote:
> > We have a X-KDE-Text boolean property now in mimetypes, to tell which
> > one have a plain text representation - so that kmail can show the
> > contents if asked for. application/x-perl, x-ruby and x-python have it
> > set to true, for instance, as well as all the text/* mimetypes.
> 
> > I think email programs should have the option to view the plain text
> > source for everything, builtin, but indeed firing text editors in the
> > general case (e.g. from a filemanager) isn't useful (to a
> > non-developer).
> 
> Wouldn't it be better to just check the start of the file for control
> characters? Or even just show it anyway? In ROX-Filer, clicking on any
> file with Shift held down loads it as if it was a text/plain file, for
> example.
Nice for binaries :)
I don't think it makes sense to always offer to view something as plain text though.

> We already have 'text/*' to indicate that text is a reasonable want to
> view the file (as a default option). Having another layer ("This file
> shouldn't normally be viewed as text, but advanced users could still get
> some sense out of it") doesn't seem necessary, given that an advanced user
> should be able to view *anything* as text, if they want (eg, an MS-Word
> document).
But viewing binary data as text is much less useful than viewing e.g.
python/ruby/perl scripts or postscript files, as text.

I think the point of X-KDE-text is to offer a sensible "advanced users can view AND
edit this as text" option in some apps (which is the case for perl/ruby/python,
but editing as text is definitely not a good idea with binary formats). Andras, 
can you confirm?

> > (The other special property we have is X-KDE-NativeExtension, so that the
> > file dialog can offer to automatically append a given extension).
> 
> Something like this?
> 
>   <preferred-extension>png</preferred-extension>

Yes.

> What happens for files without a preferred extension given in the database?

The file dialog doesn't offer to append an extension automatically, the user
has to provide it.

- -- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by TrollTech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
Wireless network using 2 laptops; tomsrtbt linux - http://blackie.dk/~dfaure/wifi.html
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