Fwd: Re: MIME changes

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 11:51:51PM +0300, Andras Mantia wrote:
> I think the problem is not that the user will see some garbage that
> he/she doesn't understand. The problem is that non-text files may harm
> the application behavior. 
> 
that's major bull. fix the applications, not their input. if you can
crash a text editor with some random binary data, you have a gorgeous
security hole. note that kde applications can receive their data
directly from the net, so this imposes a _real_ problem.

i'm more concerned about the data itself. crlf and tab conversion or
trailing whitespace stripping are quite deadly to binary data.

joe user confronted with a screenfull of garbage usually refrains
from being a kde advocate, at least for some time. :)
so while it should be possible to force applications to eat
inappropriate input and they should handle it gracefully, it should be
reasonably hard (read: non-obvious, e.g., from the command line or with
an explicit "open with ..." entry) to trigger such situation.

so i'm all for something like that x-kde-text or type inheritance or
however it might be implemented. but that should not be used as an
excuse for bad code ...

greetings

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