[vorbis-dev] Mime Type and Ogg (More)

[Chris Hanson]

At 8:29 PM -0200 10/19/00, Ali Abdin wrote:
>Doh! Windows uses file extension! my bad. Well, KDE/Konqueror use mime-type! I
>believe BeOS uses mime-type, what about MacOS X? Unix in "general" uses
>mime-type for some stuff. But whatever.

Mac OS X uses file types and creators as I described previously, with 
file extensions as a fallback.

(Also, just so everyone knows, there are a number of people who use 
the QuickTime Player to play audio as well as video files.  Aside 
from the stupid brushed-metal look it's actually really functional 
and useful.  If Apple added playlist support it'd be killer.  Then 
again, there are people who have written shareware playlist 
applications that work with the QuickTime player...)

>  > Besides, it appears that the decision has already been made.
>  > Nautilus needs to fit in with the rest of the world, not try to bend
>  > the rest of the world to conform to its vision (particularly where
>  > its vision is flawed, such as in its assumption that a MIME type or
>  > an imbedded magic number conveys enough information about a file to
>  > determine what application to use to launch it).
>
>Whoaaaah! Thats a pretty deep statement. You are basically saying "MIME type"
>is useless and apps shouldn't use it to determine a file type.

WRONG.  What I'm saying is that MIME type ONLY specifies a file's 
type, and that a file's type is often insufficient for determining 
which application to use to launch it.

An Ogg file is an Ogg bitstream.  *That* is its type.  It may contain 
a Vorbis stream or two, a video stream or two, an effects track, a 
metadata track, closed captioning tracks in several languages... 
Tell me, what would you have the MIME type be for an ogg bitstream 
containing two audio tracks -- audio and artist's commentary -- plus 
text caption tracks in several languages?  How would you determine 
the "right" application to open for this particular file?

All of this argues for not worrying about this stuff at the file-type 
(MIME type, MacOS type code, file extension) level and instead 
putting the onus on the playback applications to do the right thing 
with whatever files they're told to open.  If you build a playback 
application with as good an interface as the QuickTime player (minus 
the stupid brushed metal look) and add good playlist support your 
problem would be solved.

And if your desktop environment doesn't keep the orthogonal concepts 
of file type and launching application separate, that's a design 
flaw.  Fix it in your desktop environment, figure out some way to 
work around it, or live with it.  Don't try to dictate that "audio 
Ogg streams should use audio/ogg and video Ogg streams should use 
video/ogg and just ignore all those pesky edge cases."

   -- Chris


-- 
Christopher M. Hanson <cmh at bDistributed.com>
President & CEO, bDistributed.com, Inc.
Developers of database-backed web sites
(847) 372-3955

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