Re: [Usability] An Attempt at tasks for the FOSD

[Dave Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>]

On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 13:24, Julien Olivier wrote:
> > Ocasional by Many (Suggested, more clicks)
> > > * Add a folder to the list of frequent folders
> > > * Create a new folder
> > > * Change settings specific to the file type being used
> > Suggested addition: Toggle whether the filename extension should be
> > hidden or shown.  I believe it should be supplied automatically, in
> > either case.  I believe that the default should be "hidden".
> 
> Excuse me if I'm wrong but does GNOME use file extensions at all ? i
> thought it was al about MIME-Types. I mean that, in GNOME, a JPEG file
> can be called "pictures.cork.ie" if you really want (and it would still
> be recognized as a JPEG file), couldn't it ? So hiding extensions would
> actually imply that extensions are some special codes determining the
> file type, which they aren't. And that's confusing if the sub-system
> doesn't use extensions to determine the file type but the FOSA acts like
> if it did...
> 
> Does anyone follow me here ?
> 
> So, my suggestion is to show the "extension" and not to allow to hide it
> at all.


A fair point...  although the FreeDesktop spec does seem to allow
pattern matching such as "*.html" to be significant.
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info-spec/

But IIRC, is this code meant to work everywhere GTK is meant to work
i.e. not just within GNOME?

So is it the case that, for every supported use of GTK:
- we do everything via MIME-types, probably using the FreeDesktop spec 
- we're on Windows, and file-extension matters (IIRC), but applications
should use the standard Win32 fileselector anyway
- we're on a Mac, and file extensions may or may not matter, but apps
should use a native fileselector rather than ours.

How does the proposed GtkFileChooser interact with GTK on Win32 and on
the Mac?
My guess is that is it intended that the API is the same, but what about
the resulting dialog:
(i) is it the native file-selector widget? (perhaps cunningly hacked to
allow the app to add extra GTK widgets)
(ii) or is it a GTK widget that looks like the native fileselector
widget (we hope)?
(iii) or is it the same fileselector widget as on all the other
platforms?

Dave Malcolm