Re: File Extension Madness

[...]

> The key problem that we want to avoid is a situation where someone
> working with native files (say boo.gnumeric) decides to send the
> file to someone as an xls. The displayed name is
> 'boo.gnumeric'
> They select 'Excel 97' and save. We're in the incomfortable
> situation of either
> - changing the file name for them to use the right suffix
> : I don't like this, the app should never pretend to be
> smarter than the user.
>
> - allowing them to send a useless gzipped xml (a .gnumeric
> file)
> to an MS Excel user.
> : This is also unpleasant. No one likes receiving
> useless data.
> - Warn them (possibly with a 'just this once')
> :This is what gnumeric currently does.

This leads to another problematic use case. When a user works with a
.gnumeric and saves it as .xls before sending it to a Excel equipped
friend - which file will he continue to work on? How can we make sure
that there's no data loss?

Maybe this is completely out of scope, though.

Rob

PS: sorry for crappy webmail
Received on Mon Aug 16 16:55:40 2004