Why is Fedora a multimedia disaster? - Here is why.

[Ian Malone]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:

> browsers, at least when the correct content type is sent. We have
> file viewers and A/V players that use mime-type to decide how to
> handle a file send to them. Why not file manages that do the same?
> 
> Now, there are a couple of problems here - there are some file types
> where there isn't a "magic number" to determine the mime-type. How
> do you tell the difference between a C source file, a header file,
> and a plain text file? So you might have to use extensions there.
> (If you want to open all three in the same editor, then it isn't a
> problem...)
> 

You can determine that it's text.  The best way to do it
is to store the mime-type in the filesystem.  Other
approaches have to try looking at the extensions and
parsing.  For example with Ogg it's fairly easy to come
up with a magic number to identify an Ogg stream, but
you need to do more work to identify its contents.

-- 
imalone