Re: proposal for MIME behavior in GNOME

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 04:01:03PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 12:47, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >   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...
> 
> While MIME type may not really be adequate to completely describe 
> a XHTML+SVG file or whatever, we have to remember that we are not
> aiming for a complete cataloging system, but rather something
> that describes a file well enough to know what the default viewer/editor
> for should be for the file and what actions are possible on it.
> 
> And we need this system to be comprehensible to the user. 
> 
> Sticking to the idea that a file has a single type really seems 
> pretty much essential. For an XML file, typically the root node
> of the document is going to belong to some namespace/DTD/spec, 
> and that namespace is going to determine the right viewer. I don't think
> you want one viewer for xhtml+svg and a different viewer for
> xhtml+mathml. That's just describing a broken situation for the
> user.

  right but you need to look inside the resource it's no more an
external metadata (unless you manage to get a specific Mime-Type for
that XML resource).

> In some cases (a generic container format) it may be that the
> XML structure of the document doesn't tell you what the "type"
> of the file is, but the user's model is still going to be:
> 
>  - I created this document with GnomeFrobinator
>  - Hence it's a GnomeFrobinator document
>  - And when I click on it, I want GnomeFrobinator to open it
> 
> And it's this user model that we are trying to represent. Not
> the internal structure of the file.

  Right. Now how do you flag "it's a GnomeFrobinator document" ?
The normal way is to have a dedicated Mime-Type :-)

Daniel

-- 
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