Icon-naming-spec names help... (I am a bit confused)

[Jakob Petsovits]

On Monday 22 September 2008, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 11:03 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 10:56 -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > > There are no replacements for these in the spec. A "regular file" icon
> > > doesn't make sense, as every file should have a mime type. It was used
> > > in nautilus for text file previews, and we have text-x-preview in
> > > gnome-icon-theme for that, but it is not in the spec, and I don't think
> > > it should be.
> >
> > Thats just really not true. A generic file icon makes a ton of sense.
> > You don't always want to represent mime information.
>
> Please provide a use-case where it makes sense.

In a web-based version control repository viewer where figuring out the 
mimetypes would unnecessarily drain on the web app's performance, which 
doesn't really make all that much sense because mostly the files in a 
repository are just text files. (Not always though, hence a mimetype-agnostic 
icon.)

But of course, that's hardly related to fd.o (or is it?) and I guess you'd 
disagree with this use case, proposing that an application should *always* try 
to figure out an application's mimetype. Also over remote protocols such as 
FTP files displayed in a file manager, and stuff. Or maybe I'm guessing wrong.