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

John Summerfield schrieb:
> 
> > 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:
> >
> 
> It's been done. OS/2 does it with extended attributes. It's how OS/2 does long filenames on FAT, you can edit a file's properties and change the idcon associated with it, edit a folder and change its background without effecting other folders, you can edit the menu associated with any object and add items to it. For example, I could  the menu for a file called "Bills Rasberry" to invoke sendmail; every time I choose that menu item it would mail it off to Bill.

I never had contact to OS/2 but heared a lot of these things. Too sad it
didn't have much influence on today's OS which might not even look like
today's compared to OS/2 but I am now using opinons from others not
checked myself ;)

> If I create a document using IBM Works and store it as "letter to Bill" then that's its name. It does not need or have any suffix to identify it as an IBM Works document.
> 
> A standard menu item on objects descended from "WPDatafile" is "Print." If the object is an IBM Works document, then choosing "Print" opens IBM Works to print it (so does dropping it on a printer).

But that needs a fully elaborated object system, doesn't it? This print
thing could be done by extending mimetype treatment description to some
standard actions like "print" etc with giving explicit command line
options like "kword -print %f -nonewgui" etc. If I got it right this
kind is done it the OS commited in Redmond. 

Was one able to derive new objects himself, like "letter" from some kind
of "document" and have it as a system wide new object type that could be
given attributes so all instances of that type have it? Like show this
icon for "letter"?

Friedrich