Re: [Nautilus-list] script w/ mime handling

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Wed, 2001-10-17 at 18:17, John Sullivan wrote:
    I think technically the mime-folder-hierarchy wouldn't be too hard, but I
    think there are at least four major usability problems with it:
    
    (1) It puts the burden on every user (or the installer program if there is
    one) to put each script in the right place. This is much more error-prone
    than if the script just "does the right thing" in the Scripts folder.

No, if you dont know about the mime hierarchy, just dont create one. If
the user has a ~/.gnome/nautilus-scripts/mime/ directory, then nautilus
would treat scripts inside the mime/ folder so that they only show up in
the menu if the mime type matches the path name under mime/ (image/jpeg
for example). All "normal" scripts would still be in
~/.gnome/nautilus-scripts/ like they are now.
    
    (2) Using the hierarchy in this way precludes a commonly-asked-for feature
    of letting the user create arbitrary subfolders in the scripts folder.

You still can, you just dont want to name your subfolder "mime".
    
    (3) It forces users to think about and deal with MIME types explicitly. I
    don't think we want to limit the utility of the Scripts mechanism to only
    users who are thoroughly conversant in MIME types.
    
    (4) If the Scripts menu reflects the folder hierarchy, then you've got to
    navigate multiple levels of hierarchical menus to choose a script, which is
    a pain. If the Scripts menu doesn't reflect the folder hierarchy, then
    there's a hard-to-understand relationship between the Scripts folder and the
    Scripts menu.

No, the MIME scripts could even be on the context menu's toplevel, there
could be a new group between "Rename" and "Move to Trash" where those
would be. Like Jonathan's "Format floppy" example. Since the scripts you
put to the mime stuff are likely to be pretty specific, and you would
not be having all your scripts on the menu at once like you do now with
the "all scripts handle all files" situation.

One could even have submenu hierarchies for scripts that are inside the
mime/ tree, but maybe that would be overkill.

Tuomas

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