Subject: Re: Mime-types
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Feb 08 2001 - 11:43:39 CST
At 07:57 PM 2/8/01 +1100, Tim Allen wrote:
>One minor detail - what is the Abiword mime-type? I guess something like
>application/x-abiword would be a reasonable stab at it. Or do we want to
>register it officially, and hence lose the 'x-'? Or even, has someone
>already registered it?
Quick background note -- on two platforms, we've been setting MIME types for
quite a while now:
abi/src/af/xap/win/xap_Win32App.cpp (rev 1.28; Apr 5, 1999)
abi/src/af/xap/beos/xap_BeOSApp.cpp (rev 1.7; Jul 3, 1999)
In both cases, the changes were made to notify the OS about which files we
support, so that they'd be double-clickable. (BTW, does this Just Work on
any other platforms without user intervention? It should.) Unfortunately,
the MIME types chosen were different:
Win32 -- application/abiword
BeOS -- text/x-abiword
IIRC, there was debate at the time about the best way to make sure that
other text and XML apps didn't "steal" our files away from us via text/* or
text/xml* rules. Also, if we had an inferiority complex, all other "real"
word processors have application/ prefixes. We obviously never came to a
definitive conclusion.
Anyone on the list who'd like to flash their IETF credentials can own this
issue, as far as I'm concerned.
In the mean time, here's some more data on current usage.
precedents for application/abiword
----------------------------------
According to Google, there have been several application/abiword attachments
sent to this list:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/January/0231.html
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/May/0611.html
Also, someone posted to abiword-user that they'd gotten double-click
launches working on KDE using application/abiword:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-user/00/April/0018.html
precedents for text/abiword
---------------------------
In June 2000, someone sent a text/abiword attachment to the gnome-i18n list:
http://gnomewww.sunet.se/mailing-lists/archives/gnome-i18n/2000-June/0028.sh
tml
Then in August, gnome-vfs was updated to recognize it:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/cvs-commits-list/2000-August/msg02720.html
http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/gnome-vfs/data/mime/gnome-vfs.applications
other precedents
----------------
Google generates nothing relevant for application/x-abiword or text/x-abiword.
bottom line
-----------
It would be good to standardize this for 1.0, but no matter what we do,
we'll break existing practice on one or more platforms.
Paul
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