mime-type icons, a proposal

[Thomas Leonard]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 04:28:27PM +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 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:
[...]
> > > > 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").

Inheritance just means that a type has all the same properties as its
parent. So, text/plain can be opening with Vim, and this is therefore also
true of application/python-src. But a property such as 'is a
wordprocessor document' can also be inherited.

>From a UI point of view, this might need to be made clear. When a user
searches for a text/plain file, they may not expect to see a Python
program in the results, although this may be useful in other cases.

However, searching for an abtract type like 'word processor document'
should always include sub-types in the results.


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal at ecs.soton.ac.uk	        tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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