Re: File Extension Madness

On Sat, Aug 14, 2004 at 12:57:32AM +0000, Charles Goodwin wrote:
> > it is rare that a user would specificlaly choose a filetype and
> > deliberately specify a differnt file extension.
>
> There are many unobservant people in this world. Having witnessed this
> type of thing first hand, I can honestly say that there are many people
> who would inadvertantly do this by not realising that 'file type'
> relates to 'file extension'. It seems so obvious, but unless you are
> familiar with the jargon, it's completely unobvious. And it is jargon.

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.

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'.
Received on Mon Aug 16 15:13:12 2004