couple questions about menu spec

[Bastian, Waldo]

The general problem with adding a main category is that on many older
distributions that do not support such new main category yet, desktop
files that use this new main category will not be shown at all.

There is not really a good upgrade path.

Cheers,
Waldo
 
Intel Corporation - Platform Software Engineering, UMG - Hillsboro,
Oregon

-----Original Message-----
From: xdg-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org
[mailto:xdg-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org] On Behalf Of Jordan Mantha
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2007 12:26 PM
To: xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: couple questions about menu spec

Hello all,

I've got two questions about the freedesktop.org Menu spec that'd I'd
love to see clarified.
1) There are quite a number of scientific applications that are
professional tools rather than educational tools. I've been asked quite
a few times why Science isn't a main category for menus. According to
the spec .desktop files with Science in Categories must also have
Education category also. I can understand that having too many Main
categories could get messy, but I think there is a fairly significant
distinction between Science (and Mathematics for that matter)
applications used in education and those used for professional research.
So my question is, is there a reason Science couldn't become a main
category?

2) The menu spec glossary says that only .desktops of type Application
are allowed for Desktop entries. I've got several cases where adding
.desktops with type Link to menu structures is helpful. For instance in
educational setting, having links to websites related to the subject
along with the applications is great for kids. You can imagine having
links to the Chemistry WebBook and Wolfram's MathWorld along with
science and  math apps. Right now we can get around this by creating
.desktop files that execute a web browser with the desired URL, but I
think that it's not very intuitive. In Gnome, for instance, I find it a
bit inconsistent that you can have Type=Link .desktops on the desktop
but not in the menu. Any thoughts on feasibility?

-Jordan Mantha
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