Icons for mimetypes

[David Faure]

It was suggested here that mimetype icons should simply be named after
the mimetype. Here is a comment about this, and possible suggestion for improvement.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: kdelibs/mimetypes/application
Date: Wednesday 22 October 2003 16:39
From: Allan Sandfeld Jensen <kde at carewolf.com>
To: kde-cvs at kde.org

On Wednesday 22 October 2003 16:21, David Faure wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 October 2003 16:18, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> > As I understand your statement about XDG, you are suggesting having an
> > icon _per_ mimetype (icons named after mimetypes). Is that really
> > necessary?
>
> What would be your objection against it?
> Too many duplicate icons? But isn't that icon-theme-dependent (i.e.
> artist-motivation-dependent :) ? By having no icon name in the mimetype,
> but a fixed name for the icon, we let the possibility to icon theme
> designers to decide how many different icons they want to draw, and how
> many mimetypes should have the same icon.

Yes, but in rather bad scalable way. To avoid coping the icons you would need 
an icon translation layer for themes, and they would need to be aware of all 
existing and future mimetypes. I would rather suggest a different tree for 
icons than mimetypes such that an openoffice writer document would be:
data/document/wordprocesser/openoffice. That way a theme could provide just a 
generic document type, one for wordprocessers, or one specifically for 
openoffice writer documents. 
Under this system the information would still lie with the mimetype and not 
with the icon theme, making it possible to introduce new mimetypes to 
existing themes.

`Allan

-------------------------------------------------------

Another suggestion was made by Waldo:
maybe we could pick up the icon of the default application associated
with the mimetype and use it as a fallback, when the icon for the mimetype
isn't available.

-- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).