mime-type icons, a proposal

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 17:29 +0200, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Friday 01 October 2004 16:28, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > > 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").
> 
> No, the inheritance specifies "is also". The mimetype itself specifies actual 
> physical compatibility. Files of type "text/plain" have certain 
> characteristics ("application/x-gzip" would make a better example since it 
> would actually imply a certain well-defined file-format) So when 
> "application/python-src" inherits from "text/plain", we say it "is also" of 
> type text/plain: it has also all the charactestics typical for the 
> "text/plain" format (If it had inherited from "application/x-gzip" it would 
> mean that files of the "application/python-src" type had the gzip file format 
> by definition)
> 
> The "wordprocessor document" type means "document generated with a 
> wordprocessor", this doesn't translate to a particular on-disk file format 
> (which is why the file type determination function will never return it as 
> type) but the inheritance relationship is the same, if another MIME-type 
> inherits it it means that having a file of this other MIME-type also implies 
> that the file has all the characteristics of "wordprocessor document".

I still don't like adding nonstandard MIME types that are not even
"real" mime types to the database just because this allows us to use an
implementation detail to allow search-by-category. I mean, the same
results could be gotten from defining a key "is-of-category" in the mime
database, and filling it in like you would fill out the inheritance with
fake mimetypes. The UI for using this would be exactly the same as the
one that used fake mimetypes. (I.e. It'd contain a dropdown list of
known document types to look for.)

It also avoids some multiple inheritance.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a time-tossed Amish vampire hunter with a passion for fast cars. She's a 
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