Re: forcing html rendering for files without extensions

Mouse wrote in
 <[email protected]>:
 |> [...x-tar-gz...]
 |> So the idea was "recursively unpacking known extensions chains until
 |> no more unpacking is possible".
 |
 |Fine, but should it be driven off the name or the contents?  I see
 |arguments both ways.

Well.  "Normally" the media type is simply derived from the
extension.  (Or not even that, some MUA do "is-text" content
analysis and use text/plain if for good.)

 |>> [...], then the log.c file is probably C source in the first case
 |>> and probably not in the second, despite the identical names.
 |
 |>> The hard part, of course, is telling the difference mechanically;
 |>> that's why so many things use such heuristics.
 |
 |> [I]n practice, i find it constructed really, because i would assume
 |> the latter example being in a very dedicated environment that would
 |> not be mixed up.
 |
 |Probably.  But it's happened to me at least once (finding a .c file
 |which was actually third in a series and confusing it with C source).

Oh it happened to me, it did.
That is to say .. to me it is either text or binary data .. which
is what less(1) says when i go for a file.  (Or actually it is
  alias v='LESS= less -RIFe')

 |> [B]ut on for example Windows people surely do not even *know* that
 |> this is possible, but take the file extension and program bundle for
 |> granted.
 |
 |Some of them.  While they're rarer than among Unix types, I have met
 |Windows users who would know exactly what's going on there.
 |
 |I really blame the tools.  Way too many Windows programs hide \.[^.]*
 |extensions, displaying only the part before that.  I've long ago lost
 |count of the number of spams aimed at me which have things like an
 |attachment which the content says is something innocuous like a PDF,
 |but is named .rar and, based on the contents, would be more honestly
 |named with a .exe...presumably depending on the target's MUA to hide
 |the extension, or maybe depending on the target to not notice.

I have not really used Windows since 95B.
But i *think* to memorize that the file manager did show the name
of the application that would open the file, rather than anything
else.  (I never used "icon views".)

 |> I would love to get this "extension-chain" notion into the wild.
 |
 |It already is, to at least some extent.  I have seen, and use, .tar.bz2
 |and the like routinely.  A past version of my FTP server would
 |automatically handle them; for example, if there were a directory `src'
 |and you asked for src.tar.bz2, it would tar src up, bzip2 the result,
 |and send you that.  (I arguably should readd that code to the FTP
 |server I now use, but so few people use it I'm not sure there's any
 |point.)

Yes.  But the question is in how far this is hardcoded and fixed
to certain things, rather than following the "chain unpacking"
thing.  For example, here i can "tar -xf" a .tar.gz or what, but
i think that on OpenBSD you will get a "roly poly hammer" (i could
think it was him) asking you for correct command line arguments?
And it is not "official" for IANA and media types, therefore lots
of x-tar-gz and similar "fictional constructs" fly around, because
people try to get the job done (tm).

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)