mime-type icons, a proposal

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 16:16 +0200, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Friday 01 October 2004 15:18, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> Your file-type detection returns a type and then you ask "is this type a 
> wordprocessor document", and then it will return yes or no, depending on 
> whether the type inherits from the generic wordprocessor document type.

Thats not right. Right now the "inheritance" in the mime database is
specifies actual physical compatibility. E.g. application/python-src
inherits from text/plain. We don't want to overload this with another
type of inheritance ("is a file used by the same sort of application").


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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an impetuous vegetarian filmmaker on the wrong side of the law. She's a 
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