[RFC] Shared-MIME-Info wording: In a nutshell vs. extensive

[Christian Neumair]

Some months ago there has been some discussion on the wording of shared-
mime-info. Obviously, there are some good arguments for and against
writing out particular expressions [1].
I attached the remaining questionable parts from a patch I submitted to
this mailing list.
Here an example:

Written out (current): eXtensible Markup Language document
Short (proposed): XML document

While "eXtensible Markup Language" is the full term, I think that TLAs
are quite common and whoever deals with these documents isn't really
interested in TLA expansion. He wants to know as soon as possible what
type the file actually is of. XML is a very common term and not many
want to struggle with nomenclature. Another example would be Portable
Network Graphics/PNG. IMHO people say "hey Frank, would you please give
me that PNG image" instead of "hey Frank, would you please give me that
Portable Network Graphics file".

Therefore I propose to introduce a clear and brief paradigm, where we
should try not to expand TLAs where possible, which means where it is
common to just use the TLA.

If you really insist on a elaborate description, we'd probably need to
introduce a new tag to the mime info spec.

regs,
 Chris

[1] http://freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-January/003191.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: fd.xml.diff
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 5276 bytes
Desc: 
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20040202/0a946e74/attachment.bin