Proposal for better handling of mimetype icon themeing

[Rodney Dawes]

On Wed, 2005-12-21 at 19:50 +0000, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> .. although perhaps this new "-x-generic" postfix solves some of the
> problems. Could you point me to the discussion where the new syntax was
> agreed? I'll update the text on the web-site to reflect the change and add
> the link.

That's what the x-generic is for, but then again, if a theme is following the
spec, text really wouldn't appear in any other contexts. Then again, if
the contexts were actually defined to be used to request certain icons
for certain application contexts, it also wouldn't be a problem.

Beyond that, I simply made up the "-x-generic", threw it in, and nobody
has disagreed. It seemed the best solution to me, given that it is easy
to implement, follows the MIME type naming standards for new names
(hence the preceding x-), and avoids name conflicts. There was no
discussion on what to name it really. Prepending "mime:" to every single
icon may solve a very small issue for a very small set of icons, but
it's still redundant. With text, we could implement a solution with the
stuff Alex is doing here, I think, and use text-plain as the fallback,
but that doesn't help with audio/* or image/* types.

In terms of "fixing" the Shared MIME Info Spec, at some point, I think
the solution is going to just be to make it point at the Icon Naming
Spec for information on how to name icons. MIME types are excruciatingly
hard, and what's in there now may not be the best solution. It's
basically me making stuff up, and trying to avoid having everything be
under appliation/*, because quite frankly, very few things under it,
actually are applications.

That said, if you want to review the spec, and provide some feedback
so that we can improve it, then please do. I welcome it. :)

-- dobey