Icon-mime type associations

[Kenneth Wimer]

* Ryan Gammon <rgammon at real.com> [Sep 17. 2004 01:01]:
> Frans Englich wrote:
> 
> >On Thursday 16 September 2004 01:48, Ryan Gammon wrote:
> >
> >A common use of mimetype icons is to follow up the document/context 
> >centric model; an icon tries to resemble what it represents as close as 
> >possible in order to make the user's association steps as short as 
> >possible. Functional names is another example. If cases like this(3rd 
> >party branding, I guess) is the major reason for the usage of such an 
> >mechanism, it would be a step backwards in terms of usability, AFAICT.
> > 
> >
> 
> I think it's a step forwards.
> 
> Let's say the desktop alone controls document icons. I'd argue that 
> there's no way the desktop can both know about all media types, and have 
> icons representing all of them. New types get introduced all the time, 
> not all icon theme maintainers have the time to write icons for all 
> document types, etc.
> 
> If the icon theme does not have a suitable icon, there are two things 
> the desktop could do:
> - Show a generic file icon
> - Let the app provide an icon
> 
> If we show the user a generic icon, it provides no information to the user.
> 
> If we show a vendor-provided document, that at least tells the user 
> "this is content I can play with the Helix Player." They can recognise 
> that this file is a media file, and that it will open in Helix Player. I 
> think this is a step forward.
> 
> Now, the vendor icon is a neutral hicolor icon, so it might not match 
> the surrounding icons, but that's more of a "should hicolor exist" kind 
> of argument. It seems to have been decided that hicolor is a good idea, 
> much to our satisfaction, or we'd be stuck trying to provide individual 
> icons for every icon theme -- not practical.

I guess you don't have this problem in KDE. AFAIK KDE does mimetyle
handling pretty conservatively with a very liberal amount of
"changeability". Are we only talking about gnome here? Since everyting
is about "hicolor" icons I wonder......is this a problem for freedesktop
or gnome?

Bye,
Kenneth
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