Icon-mime type associations

[Jakub Steiner]

On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 18:48 -0700, Ryan Gammon wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm a developer on the Helix Player for Linux, and the RealPlayer 10 for 
> Linux, which is based on the RealPlayer.
> 
> I'm involved in ensuring that the player follows the standards put 
> forward by freedesktop.org.
> 
> We're very excitied to see some unification taking place between the 
> gnome, kde, and other desktops in terms of how they deal with mime 
> types. There is, however, one area of the spec in which we're running 
> into problems.
> 
> The current specs don't appear to provide for an app to add an icon for 
> a given mime type.
> 
> In the old .keys-based gnome system, we would add the mime type in 
> question to our realplay.keys file that would look something like
> 
> audio/x-pn-realaudio:
>         description=RealPlayer Presentation
>         icon_filename=realplay-audio-ra.png
>         ....

One thing I don't like about your approach is that it forces your mime
type icons even in cases when the desktop theme already has icons for
that specific mime type. I would expect putting the mime types to
hicolor be more appropriate since your new icons would only be used if
the current theme doesn't have an icon for it. 

Forcing your specific icons may clash with the users' selected theme and
totally breaks the concept of icon themes.

cheers

-- 
Jakub Steiner <jimmac at novell.com>
Novell, Inc.