Mimetype Activation (Was: Shared mimetypes + activation)

[Jonathan Blandford]

Alexander Larsson <alexl at redhat.com> writes:

> Another important thing to keep in mind here is mime aliases. If we e.g.
> add a mime type for .php files (say text/x-phpsrc) suddenly all *.php
> files are of that type, and an editor registered to handle text/plain
> won't be used to open it. So, we need some sort of aliases, allowing you
> to have a specific default handler for text/x-phpsrc, but if none
> exists, we use the one for text/plain. And the list of all apps handling
> the file should contain both the text/plain and the text/x-phpsrc
> handlers.

I don't know if this really belongs in the spec.  Does this mean that we
have to add a link to all 67 text/* mime types just to get them to be
opened by a text editor?  This seems more an instance of text/plain
being special -- there's not really an equivalent for any of the other
domains (image, audio, application etc.)  It's basically expected that a
text editor can open any other text file, while an image program only
can open images that it knows about.

Given that, we have some other options:

 * Treat text/plain as special, and have the various desktops assume
   that applications that support text/plain also support text/*.

 * Do nothing, but make applications register themselves.  As an
   example, gedit has syntax highlighting for a bunch of file types.
   Registering it as handling those, as well as text/plain would catch a
   large chunk files.  That then leaves the user only associating those
   few file types that he runs across with the application.

Thoughts?
-Jonathan

PS. I noticed that this thread was CCed to kde-core-devel at kde.org.
Should we keep it cross posted?  I assume that those who care about MIME
on those lists would be on xdg too.