Re: File Extension Madness

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 01:35:23PM +0000, Charles Goodwin wrote:
> > It also raises questions of how to display a filename in the save
> > dialogs. Should that be
> > foo <type == excel>
> > or
> > foo.xls <type == excel>
> > or
> > foo.xls <type == by extension>
> >
> > The last option seems fraught with ambiguity. There are several
> > different formats named 'xls' we can pick one of them, but I don't
> > really like it. The first option is not terribly pleasant either,
> > someone may put in foo.xls themselves, forcing us to guess if they
> > some how wanted a file called 'foo.xls.xls'.
>
> For the reasons you mention, it has to be #2.

Unfortunately that puts us into an ugly position w.r.t. the first
problem.

Display shows 'foo.xls' and user changes the file type from
    XL -> Gnumeric
Does the app auto change the extension to match ? Probably yes,
subject to lots of restrictions (eg it has to match the previous
file type). That feels perilously close to an app being too pushy
for my taste.
Received on Mon Aug 16 15:41:10 2004