Mimetype Activation (Was: Shared mimetypes + activation)

[Waldo Bastian]

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Hi,

Mimetype activation / mimtype actions is a somewhat complex set of issues. I 
will try to give an overview of the requirements in this area based on 
http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/mime/ and current KDE usage.

R1) Applications can be associated with a mimetype to indicate that files of 
that mimetype can be opened with that application (Open)
R1-1) Users should be able to associate an application with an additional 
mimetype
R1-2) Users should be able to remove an association between an application and 
a mimetype

R2) At most one application can be associated with a mimetype as the preferred 
application to use for opening files of that mimetype (Primary Application)
R2-1) Users should be able to select the Primary Application out of all 
applications able to open a given mimetype.
R2-2) Users should be able to order on preference all applications able to 
open a given mimetype. (currently available KDE functionality)
R2-3) A mechanism must be in place to determine the Primary Application if the 
user has not explicitly selected such Primary Application for a given 
mimetype.

R3) Actions other than Open can be associated with a mimetype to indicate that 
such action can be performed on files of that mimetype. (Actions)
R3-1) Actions should have an associated icon, a translatable caption and 
possibly a description and, most important, a description of how to activate 
the action (such as an Exec= line for example)

R4-1) The Open action may be associated with a desktop/browser specific 
loadable component (KPart, Nautilus component) instead of an application.
R4-2) Actions may be associated with a desktop/browser specific loadable 
component (KPart, Nautilus component) instead of an application.

Does this look somewhat complete? For some of these (The R4s for example) we 
may choose not to include them in a standard but they should probably still 
be kept in mind while creating the standard.

Cheers,
Waldo

On Fri April 23 2004 13:26, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Last night I have been talking with Jonathan Blandford about the shared
> mimetype spec and the activation issues. Both Jonathan and I hope to move
> that forward in the next weeks.
>
> Some relevant threads from the past:
> *  MIME Activation
> 	http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.xdg.devel/554 (Mar 2003)
> *  Default Program | File Association
> 	http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-January/003134.html
> * Associating a mime-type with an icon
> 	http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-February/003390.html
> 	http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-March/003493.html
> * Associating programs with file types (
> 	http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-March/003442.html
>
> A proposal for the behavior of the new MIME system in GNOME:
> 	http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/mime/
>
> The issues that need to be looked at can be split into two distinct
> problems: * Which icon to use for a mimetype (icons)
> * Which actions/programs are associated with a mimetype (activation)
>
> For ease of reference I will bifurcate (I learned a new word!) this thread
> into one for icons and one for activation. More to come... stay tuned.
>
> Cheers,
> Waldo

- -- 
bastian at kde.org |  ...  Watch this space  ...  | bastian at suse.com
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