Re: [mime-info database] inode types

[David Faure <dfaure trolltech com>]

On Sunday 24 August 2003 01:20, Jaap Karssenberg wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 00:17:40 +0200 David Faure wrote:
> : Does it say anywhere that text/plain is the default!?!?
> : I thought the default for "unknown mimetype" was generally
> : application/octet-stream.
> 
> quoting 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info-spec/0.11-onehtml/
> 
> " If nothing matches, the default type of application/octet-stream
> should be used for binary data, or text/plain for textual data. Checking
> the start of the file for ASCII control characters is a good way to
> guess whether a file is binary or text, but note that files with
> high-bit-set characters should still be treated as text since these can
> appear in UTF-8 text, unlike control characters. "

OK.

And what you said about it was:
> the choice of the default mimetype can be application dependant

I would agree with that, of course, but not everything is done from within the
target application. When you click on a file in a file manager, it needs to
figure out the mimetype (well, it probably did so when choosing the icon
for the file, but anyway) : in such a case we need a global heuristic for
determining the default mimetype, like the one described in the spec.

-- 
David FAURE, faure kde org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).