Allen Pulsifer wrote:

> Hello Mathias,
> 
> There may be a misunderstanding about the suggestion.
> 
> If you do a File | Open in OOo, the File Type displayed by default is "All
> files (*.*)".  You can manually select "Text documents", "Spreadsheets",
> "Presentations", etc., or you can select a specific file extension, such as
> "OpenDocument Text (*.odt)".
> 
> The suggestion is not to list all file extensions supported by OOo.  The
> suggestion is to add another type grouping, "All Documents", that would be
> similar to "Text documents", "Spreadsheets", "Presentations", etc.  When
> selected, this would cause the File chooser dialog to display all document
> types supported by OOo, i.e., it would display Text documents + Spreadsheets
> + Presentations + ....  In that way, it would be similar to All Files,
> except it would not display files with extensions OOo cannot open, such as
> .pdf.
> 
> Does that make sense?

Ah, fine. I misunderstood you and thought you wanted to change the
behavior of "All files". Yes, something like this could makes sense,
though I'm wondering if "All documents" is understandable.

Anyway, IMHO "All documents" shouldn't be the default filter as then you
created a problem for all people that don't use extensions at all or
that use files with unknown extensions (e.g. text files with extension
"log"). These files then will not be visible by default though OOo could
load them without any problems. OOo does not use extensions to decide
wether it can load a particular file, it checks the content. Extensions
are only a hint to speed up the search or resolve ambiguities.

OTOH if we didn't use this "all documents" filter by default the
question remains if it makes sense at all. As I understood you wanted to
have this filter as a feature for the unexperienced users. But without
having this filter used by default I assume that especially these user
won't use it.

So all in all I think that though your idea makes some sense I don't see
how it could be implemented without either annoying a part of the user
base or hiding this new filter so that especially the target audience
for it will never find it.

Ciao,
Mathias

-- 
Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer
OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS
Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]".
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