Re: proposal for MIME behavior in GNOME

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 12:47:28PM -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 11:54:29AM -0500, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> > Murray Cumming Comneon com writes:
> > 
> > > > Presumably valid xml files will appear as text/xml, and not 
> > > > as text/plain.
> > > 
> > > And will that be handled the same as application/octet-stream files, or just
> > > opened silently with a default XML-editing application such as gedit?
> > 
> > What do you want it to do?  What's the 'right' behavior when you get an
> > unknown xml file.  Should it open in an application like conglomerate or
> > in a text editor.
> 
>   Unfortunately Mime-Type is clearly inadequate now for specifying
> the default processing of a resource in the face of XML usage.
> One way is to try to detect namespaces in the document first kbyte
> or so, grepping for common strings might be sufficient. But it is
> outside purely Mime-Type handling...

Maybe time to develop a universal viewer/preview for any file?  IE:
anything image-like shows up in an eog window, anything text like shows
up in a text edit window, anything binary or unknown displays
information about that file and suggestions on which apps might be right
to view it.

alan

-- 
Alan <alan ufies org> - http://arcterex.net
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