mime-type icons, a proposal

[Frans Englich]

On Sunday 03 October 2004 18:34, Jakub Steiner wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 21:41 -0700, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> > up (Mac OS X), Ryan *demonstrated* that they are more app-centric than
> > you are giving them credit for, and the platform is still
> > aesthetically just fine.
>
> One thing that speaks against app-centric icons for mime types is the
> number of combinations when you have to deal with the concept of icon
> themes.
>
> There is no concept of icon themes on OSX as far as I know. There is a
> single set, with defined guidelines. Having a single look for the "Linux
> desktop" would surely be nice, but realistically I hardly see an
> agreement on a global KDE/Gnome icon theme possible.

I don't think it's difficult for finding interest for such a theme, nor that 
the environments would hesitate(well, perhaps a little) to implement it, 
although it's a large scale change. But I doubt it too, but for other 
reasons. More about that when I got a draft, RSN.

> So if icon themes 
> cannot go and we want to have app-defined mime-types, it means having
> multiple version of a mime type icon *per theme*. Since this will hardly
> be manageable, 


> users will end up having mixed style icons on desktops 
> and it will look like XP having all the win95 cruft all around.

I don't think that's a problem. First of all, it's very few users who will 
have custom mime types, probably in the count of single percentages. The 
(vanilla) mime type database will also have _many_ weird mime types -- it's a 
typical feature which Open Source's itch scratching fixes, the coverage of 
minor interests(at least KDE have tons). That won't create icons for them, 
though.


Cheers,

		Frans