Moving away from app-centric mimetypes (e.g. kword)

Hello!

Please help me out with an idea that came in my mind a few weeks ago.

I browsed a directory where there were a dozen files all in the format
of a well known/disliked word processor. They all were presented as of
the same mime type. But this didn't represent their real state being:
- letters
- papers
- brain drops
etc.

But I couldn't always guess it from the files' names what kind of
document they were. So it flashed through my brain:

There has to be more refinement in the representation and handling of
document files in a file manager!

But how could this be achieved? 

First at all there has to be a definition of document types. Except for
publications (as in bibtex from latex) I don't know of any already in
broad use thus accepted. And then there are different needs by different
people... one might want his set of three kind of letters: friends.
editors, and business, others don't.

And where should this document type be marked? To do this in the file's
extension doesn't seems to be a good idea, it should be left to mark the
data's format. Or go the way of two-step extensions, like "*.tar.gz"? So
we would have "thankyou.letter.kwd" and "newdesign.paper.kwd". 

Perhaps this could be bundled with the templates. In the case of KWord
there could be an entry in the documentinfo(.xml) that either sets the
type (e.g.: Letter) by which the locally stored template's icon is
identified, or the template and it's icon are integrated in the kwd-file
itself (in case of transfer to someone extern). In any case it should be
a uncomplicated way for filemanagers to estimate the specific icon.

Even better: 
Such a finer differing between files would increase all file handling.
Like:
Having a display filter in konqui only showing "report" kword files.
If one does a search for a "letter" with specific content there is no
need to open all the kwd-files but only the "letter" type ones to search
for matching text.


What do you think?

Friedrich

PS: Is there any mimetype-expert out there? Is there the possibility for
a third category, like "application/x-kword/letter"?
? 

PPS: But what is the difference between
"application/x-staroffice/letter" and "application/x-kword/letter"? Both
are letters, but in different formats. 

It is the same with pixel-images. There are a dozen formats, but no
differation between icons, wallpapers, landscape pictures etc.

Perhaps it is simply a specific wish of mine that would be best solved
with filesystem driven attributes. So I might have to wait until someone
adds support for this in KDE...