Re: [Usability]Mime type to application associations.

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

Though if I read Matthew's message right, the current system is more or
less what he's proposing.

-Seth

On Sun, 2003-02-02 at 18:32, Luis Villa wrote:
> To put this in a nutshell: the current system is a bit of a mess, and
> everyone knows it, but it won't be solved until (1) someone has a lot
> more time to write code and (2) we come up with a solution that ideally
> can be shared at freedesktop.org. That's not to knock your suggestions
> (some of which are quite good and many of which have been discussed in
> some form or another) but don't expect any traction unless you or
> someone else sits down and writes the code.
> 
> Luis
> 
> On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 21:19, Mathew Johnston wrote:
> > I'm really having trouble understanding the mime type to application
> > association scheme that Gnome uses. This is a major usability issue for
> > me.
> > 
> > First, I'll give my expectations.
> > 
> > A file has a content type; the type may be a mime type (example,
> > "application/x-dia-diagram") or gnome type category (example,
> > "Documents/Diagram/Dia diagram"). Whatever it is, it is a classification
> > of what type a file is. Type could be determined through magic numbers,
> > extention, or some information provided through protocol (HTTP
> > Content-type header, extended filesystem information, etc). 
> > 
> > Content types would either point to applications or applications would
> > point to content types.  Associations between apps and types would be
> > many to many. I think that applications pointing to content types makes
> > more sense; it's more managable too.
> > 
> > Right now, I don't know how in the hell all of these applications get
> > associated with my file types and I have no way of controling it (how
> > did gedit, NEdit, vi, etc all get associated with Plain text type
> > files?)
> > 
> > Here's my vision:
> > 
> > Applications would be defined and registered centrally; this
> > registration could be used to populate menus, etc. An interface would be
> > provided to manually register applications, easily (for non compliant
> > apps or for scripts). Compliant applications would register upon
> > execution, if they are not already registered. The application would
> > also mention to the system which file types it is capable of dealing
> > with as well as how it is capable of dealing with the types (view, edit,
> > compress, uncompress, etc); types would be referenced by pattern, so
> > that an application could say, "I can compress any file", or, "I can
> > edit any text file". Users should also be able to add extra types for an
> > application to support. One application and action could be associated
> > with a specific type as the default action (for double clicking). 
> > 
> > Does that not make sense? This would also be fairly straight forward to
> > implement from an interface perspective and it should be easy to explain
> > to new users (you install a new app that knows that it can do certain
> > things with certain file types and then the system picks up on that and
> > makes it easy for you to get to the apps).
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Mat.
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
> > 
> 
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