Description Yaroslav Mezheritsky 2008-05-01 18:12:16 EDT

Build ID: M20070212-1330

Steps To Reproduce:

Just open the "Content Types" page in "Preferences" and try to make sense of what you see. :-)


More information:

The pre-defined hierarchy of content types does not provide any place to register binary (non-text) content types. 

(Perhaps, this is the reason why "Java Class File" content type is registered on top level, as a peer of "Text" content type. This looks really silly.)

I believe there may be tons of valid reasons to allow user-defined and plugin-defined binary content types. But this report was triggered by the following specific requirement: enable additional options for text search (see discussion of another bug report: bug #228974, https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=228974).

If this hierarchy was not supposed to have any direct mapping to the standard content types (discussed in RFC 2045), then I would suggest to simply have yet another pre-defined top-level node named "Binary" (or "Non-Text") as a peer to the currently available "Text" node.

However, if this hierarchy was supposed to reflect the standard content types, then I guess the following top nodes would be fine:

    Text
    Image
    Audio
    Video
    Application
    X-Miscellaneous (or something like that)

In either case, users and plug-ins would have the place to register non-text content types.

(The "Java Class File" content-type would have to be moved down the hierarchy, of course.)