Sub-class of text/plain

[Bastien Nocera]

On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 08:50 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 23:55 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Heya,
> > 
> > I was wondering why GEdit opened up .rtf files on my system (instead of
> > say Abiword, or, heck, OpenOffice). GEdit registers itself as supporting
> > text/plain thus being the application that would support all the
> > text/plain and subclasses of text/plain mime-types.
> > 
> > The problem is that a number of mime-types that are only relatively
> > related to text/plain (ie. that are not binary) are listed as subclasses
> > of the aforementioned mime-types.
> > 
> > - application/rtf
> > Lowest common denominator word processor format, useless as text
> > - application/smil, application/x-xbel, 
> > Really a descendant of text/xml
> > - application/x-awk and a whole slew of others
> > Scripting languages, makes sense to edit those with a text editor
> > - application/x-desktop
> > A desktop file
> > 
> > Should we modify gnome-vfs to have an application that advertises the
> > proper mime-type rather than one of its parent as the default? (ie. if
> > Abiword explicitely mentioned text/rtf, it would be the default, rather
> > than GEdit that only supports the parent)
> 
> We definitely should prefer the handler for the more specific mimetype
> when picking the default application.
> 
> > Or should we remove from shared-mime-info the subclassing for those
> > types that it doesn't make sense to edit as a file? (which would bring
> > it inline with a number of other formats that are plain text, but make
> > no sense to edit in a text editor, like playlist formats)
> 
> I agree, although I'm sure there will be some difference in opinions on
> exactly which ones make sense to edit in a text editor. :)

I finally committed my changes, with some mime-types now having 2
degrees of indirection to text/plain (by making them descend from
text/html or application/xml as needed), and didn't change it if they
had a well-defined default handler, like Nautilus for .desktop files.

Cheers

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net>