On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 20:19 +0100, Chris Jones wrote: > Applications that simply go by the extension name are doing it wrong > and should be fixed. As it has already be pointed out there are better > ways. True, but it's a situation spread across numerous computer types, and file naming is the simplest scheme that can be implemented across all of them in a predictable manner. > I have two ogg files on my (KDE) desktop now. video.ogg and audio.ogg > > Both have the ogg extension, but if I click on video.ogg it correctly > opens in my choosen video player (kaffeine). audio.ogg opens correctly > in amarok, my audio player. To do that, it has to assess the content. In the past, I've come across things that are hard to identify. Sure, it'd be easy if each file had a header section that said "image/jpeg", "audio/ogg-vorbis", or whatnot, that a program could find just by reading a few bytes at the start. But it's not like that. Some things require snooping quite a bit into the file, and several times over. It goes beyond read head of file, find a look-up table on the system for what to do with it. It's snoop into file, try to match against a very large set of rules, then re-iterate. -- (This box runs FC6, my others run FC4 & FC5, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
