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

"Friedrich W. H. Kossebau" <[email protected]> Tue, 14 May 2002 22:24:20 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.kde.look
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Sean Pecor schrieb:
> 
> On Sunday 12 May 2002 10:01, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> > But how could this be achieved?
> 
> Magic cookies are employed by the mime system, so that a particular unique
> sequence of bytes in the mime cookies file are matched against the file's
> contents. As an example, if you create a file called "guess.whoseewhatsit"
> containing the text "<html><body></body></html>" you should see the HTML icon
> next to the file in a konqueror file browser window, even though you haven't
> associated the extension "whoseewhatsit" with anything.

Thanks, I know it :) Problem here is that the magic bytes are not always
helping 
e.g. simple text files with not extension are very oft "recognised" as
C++-source files or the like...

> Dave mentioned file previews, and I think he's right to do so. File previews
> are pretty useable, and as they improve they could solve your problem (for
> example, being able to define how large the preview is of kword documents, so
> you can see more of the layout and structure in order to gauge the content).
> However, icon preview performance may be pretty poor on a baseline machine. A
> delay isn't noticeable with any hardware considered state of the art within
> the past two years, but on an older machine file previews might be so slow
> that they need to be disabled.

Previews are better than nothing, I agree. But until you can't read the
text in the preview it doesn't help for text documents I fear. The
layout of a document is not often very different between different types
of text. It would help for a letter and a book, but an article and a
chapter look quite the same. 

And previews only help for visual search :(

Friedrich