Michael Wiktowy wrote:
As Rahul mentioned, newbs don't care about extensions. In fact, if they have been running Windows, they have been conditioned to not know that extensions even *exist* since Windows hides them by default (one of my big pet peeves) and finding the dialog to enable them is not newbie friendly.
Ironically, it's because of Windows that the Xiph people have been thinking for a while about separate audio only and a/v extensions. While Windows hides extensions, even Vista still uses them to determine filetype. The correct thing to do (as others have said) is to identify a mime-type and use that to tell the user what the content type is (e.g. by an icon). Gnome does it, I'd guess KDE does (I don't use it), I'll bet OSX does, the world's most popular OS doesn't. -- imalone
