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

[George]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 08:45:29PM +0100, Christian Neumair wrote:
> I don't like this at all. Having secondary text in brackets that break
> text flow is kinky.
> It's NOT sort of optional, since you have to read it anyway and it
> distracts you. Image formats tend to be sort of brand names. Many people
> know what a "JPEG image" or a "GIF image" is, so we shouldn't provide it
> as secondary but as primary information.

Don't overestimate the state of general knowledge among users.  For example
my wife has heard JPEG and GIF, but not PNG nor TIFF and would have no clue
what to think of those.

I have come to a realization that people are generally ignorant.  For example
it was quite a relevation for me to find out that nobody I knew outside of
math knew what a an "irrational number" is though to me something I must have
learned in kindergarten or maybe even it might have been encoded into my
genes.  And really the fact that an image is GIF or JPEG seems irrelevant to
most people since they have no clue about what each format does, so to me it
really is optional information only for the more technical users.  However
right now I can't think of an easy, short description of raster images that
people understand.  This is because I know that if I say "raster image" to my
wife, she's going to look at me in a similar way that I look at her when she
mentions something from chemistry (Actually I try to look like I understand
what the hell she's talking about, but it doesn't always work).  And my wife
is definately more of a technical user then an average "home" user is.  Large
part of her work (chemistry woodoo stuff I have no clue about) involves using
computers, and she's still very clueless about for example chemical structure
file formats.

We shouldn't hide the technical details (and distinction between GIF and JPEG
format is a technical detail, and while you may care about it, vast majority
of users don't even have a clue about it, just like vast majority of people
are perfectly happy to consider 3.14159 as pi and would never know better,
while to a mathematitian that is an rational approximation, and thus not even
close to the irration, transcendental, and perhaps even normal nature of pi).
So what seems like critical information to you, may be completely irrelevant
to 99% of the world out there.

Actually even for me, the fact that it's a GIF or JPEG is fairly secondary
information.  The primary information is that it's an image and a photograph
of someone's dog.  So if I am a clueless user then "GIF image" and "DCM
image" don't seem to make much difference to me while something like:
"Photographic image (GIF)" and "Medical image (DCM)" makes more sense (though
as noted about I can't think of a better term for raster images, so
"Photographic" is just something I pulled out of my ass right now, and not
something you should consider seriously).

As for the "kinkiness" of using brackets:  Yay! the kinkier the better!

George

-- 
George <jirka at 5z.com>
   Examine what is said, not who speaks.
                       -- Arabian Proverb