Icon naming spec: generic binary MIME type icon?

[Rodney Dawes]

On Thu, 2008-11-27 at 20:39 +0200, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think the icon naming spec is lacking a generic binary MIME type icon.  For 
> example, recent shared-mime-info has set text-x-generic for a lot of file 
> types that have nothing to do with text, I suppose because there's no better 
> alternative available.  And I guess this will result in an icon for text 
> files being shown for quite a few binary files in some contexts, and being 
> confused ("Hey, the icon shows this is a text file, I have several text 
> editors installed, why doesn't it open when I click it?" or "Why does this 
> text file show only gibberish when I open it in a text editor?").
> 
> How about adding let's say
> 
> binary-x-generic: The icon used for generic binary file types.

What do you define as a generic binary file type? JPEG and PNG are
binary file types. As Jakob already replied, the standard mime type
for unknown binary files is application/octet-stream so you should
use the application-octet-stream icon.

If there really is some need for a more specific generic icon, then
we can discuss that, but afaict, your solution is to use
application-octet-stream.

-- Rodney