mime types and video/audio files (was Re: Review of the thumbnailer spec)

[Joe Mason]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 4:57 PM, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> A. Walton wrote:
>
>> Just as a note, this is precisely the rationale behind "Uniform Type
>> Identifiers", which support multiple inheritance and uses the
>> currently-in-vogue reverse DNS naming scheme (e.g. you can have types
>> like "com.my-media-encoder-company.complex-video-type" conform to
>> org.xiph.vorbis, com.bbc.dirac, org.xiph.ogg-kate,
>> org.xiph.ogg-container,  public.utf8-plain-text, public.movie,
>> public.video,  public.plain-text, public.audiovisual-content,
>> public.composite-content, public.content, and public.data in a tree
>> structure which should be rather deducible from the order they are
>> given here).
>
> Is a single file allowed to have multiple UTIs?  A mkv file might have
> *all* of org.matroska.mkv-container, org.xiph.theora, org.xiph.vorbis,
> and com.dolby.ac3, for example.

I'm not sure, but UTI's are arranged in a heirarchy with multiple
inheritance, and can be dynamically created, so if all else fails you
could create a precise per-file UTI which inherits all of those.

I've long thought that cloning the UTI system would be a great
addition to desktop robustness, and get rid of a lot of the rough
edges associated with mime types.

Joe