mime-type icons, a proposal

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 14:12 +0200, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Monday 27 September 2004 13:40, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Sat, 2004-09-25 at 16:02 +0100, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> > > And if you want to allow this, you need translations and inheritance of
> > > catagories, in addition to icons. Even though
> > > 'Catagory/Documents.Numeric' isn't a 'real' MIME type, it behaves just
> > > like one. It has a translated description, a parent class, an icon, and
> > > maybe some aliases.
> >
> > I'm not sure we need the full things like translations and inheritance.
> > Maybe we should just call it "generic-icon-name" instead of "category"
> > to avoid confusing it with something more complicated that we don't
> > need.
> 
> I don't see problems with treating them as regular MIME types. The only 
> difference is that your file-type detection function would never return them. 
> I wouldn't restrict it to icons only.
> 
> It allows the user to express things like "find all wordprocessor documents", 
> regardless of whether they are made with kword, MSWord, openoffice of 
> abiword.

Hmm. But if file detection wouldn't return them, how would you search on
them?

You can't use the code you'd use for a normal mimetype search. You'd
have to special case it in some way to take the detected mimetype and
see if that is in the same category as what you're searching for. So,
whats the advantage in pretending the category is a real mime type?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an oversexed bohemian hairdresser gone bad. She's a mentally unstable 
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