Default Program | File Association

[Claes H]

> On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 14:15 +0100, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> > What is better for text/html?
> >
> > 1) gedit with InitialPreference-GNOME 9 for text/plain (text/html is
> >    sub-class-of text/plain).
> > 2) konqueror with InitialPreference 5 for text/html?
> >
>
> Clearly 2. An explicitly mentioned handler of a more specific class is
> much more likely to be what the user wants by default. Otherwise you'll
> never get anything but gedit for any kind of text based fileformat in
> the example above.

Not immediately related to the above, but it springs to my mind:
Have you thought about having different associations for different
actions? This is an extension to the discussion, and I don't know
where or even if it is supported by any desktop, but I am sincerely
missing it. What application to open a file with depends on the use
case. For many file types the difference between "Edit" and "View" is
relevant. One default is as good as another, entirely determined by
what the user has in mind *at this moment*.   Of course, double
clicking a file can only mean one thing, but I miss the ability to
specify that .html files should be edited in emacs and viewed in
Firefox, for example. A few actions like this could be standardized, I
think it could enhance usability. Context menus with standardized
options could benefit, for example.

Even if it is too early to standardize something like this, hopefully
it can be used as input to the discussion, keeping in mind for future
extensions... perhaps some day we will see edit-defaults.list and
view-defaults.list?

Thanks, Claes

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