[RESEND] [PATCH] Clean Up MIME Strings (was: Re: shared-mime-info's terminology)

[Christian Neumair]

On Mo, 2004-01-12 at 16:03 +0000, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 07:10:12PM +0100, Christian Neumair wrote:
> 
> > This is a very old patch, please review and apply if appropriate.
> 
> Most of this looks great. I'm a bit concerned about some of the
> contractions, though. A lot of entries are now in the form:
> 
>    <mime-type type="image/x-dcm">
>      <glob pattern="*.dcm"/>
>      <comment>DCM image</comment>
>    </mime-type>
> 
> The problem is that the comment tells me nothing I couldn't work out from
> the name (and I still have no clue what this file is).

It tells you that it's an image of the format DCM. The DCM extension
doesn't tell you anything about the content type/format. In addition, we
might want to have magic entries for all file formats, so that it could
be identified if you rename it to myimage.exe, too.

> The original entry:
> 
>    <comment>Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine image</comment>
> 
> looks like it would be much more useful to a user wanting to know what
> 'Image.dcm' is. If you want it shorter, perhaps something like "medical
> image"?

You noted a very general problem: Whats the right naming convention?
IMHO we could have a very short <name/> attribute that is as short as
possible and make the <comment/> extremely verbose.

> Likewise, image/svg+xml ("SVG image") could perhaps be "scalable image"?
The problem is that SVG isn't the onliest scalable image format
available, so we'd have the same name for totally different MIME types.
Using generic terms that apply to whole image categories IMHO isn't
precise enough.
"scalable SVG image" could be appropriate here.
Please collect more of strings like this so that I have a tiny TODO
list.

regs,
 Chris