Hi Sven
Seems this thread had got a little out of hand!
It is quite surprising that Joe is of the opinion that Mac apps don't
have pull downs in the Open menu. Although he no longer works for RS,
it wasn't that long ago since he did, so if he thinks that way, it's
a fairly sure bet RS thinks that way too. And we have shown that this
is not a trick used by MS or Adobe, because Apple and third party
shareware apps also use pull downs.
Anyway, the heart of the matter is your particular problem. Many
people have commented on the correct way to select files using
MacType, and they are largely correct. Most of the apps I and other
mentioned that have pulldowns clearly use MacType as the fundamental
separation issue eg Word versus Excel files, Tiff versus Jpeg,
although some may use an extension filter too.
Your problem is that text, html and xml files are all text files,
i.e. of MacType text. That is to say that are not magically
different, but are just composed of ordinary text characters, such as
angle brackets and characters. It is up to the opening software, such
as a web browser, to parse for what are defined as "tags" and display
the text correctly. The same applies to xml.
As such, as you have found, using MacType="text" will display all
types of text files, but of course that will open any xml files that
have no extension, or are "incorrectly" labelled as .txt, .xtml or .htm.
It would be my opinion that using multiple filtering options should
generate an exclusive group for the Open Dialog, not an inclusive
group, but this may be an OS problem rather than a Rb bug. If the
latter, then of course it should be fixed. This seems to be part of
your problem.
If however you are sure you only want to display files with an
extension of .xml, and ignore any other valid xml files (eg .plist),
then your solution works fine but it will not open all files that
have xml tags in them.
To be able to open every file that contains xml then you will have to
allow all text files, and have parsing code in your app that will
then bring up a dialog after Open if the file contains no xml, since
text files may or may not have any hidden file or header info.
As far as I can see there is no other way to do this.
To reiterate: there is no real difference between
the .txt, .htm, .html, .xtml or .xml extensions - they are all text
files. It is just *convention* that .xml files should contain xml,
just as .htm and .html should contain html. As an example, html files
should all have a tag with the version of html used as the first
line, but if it's not there, the web page will still be readable,
it's just convention that the line is there as an aid to browsers.
Ultimately there is no way of knowing what is in a text file until
you open it.
Another example would be .ico files for favicons, those little 16x16
icons that show up in the nav bars of browsers. There is no such
thing as an .ico file (at least in this context), as they can be
tiffs, jpegs or gifs. They do not have to have a special graphic
format. The convention of calling them .ico is so that MS IE knows
what to do with them. But on a Mac, with a MacType, it aids
tremendously in opening these, because due to licensing problems, not
all graphics apps can open gifs for example.
Tony Spencer
St Rémy de Provence (13) France
http://tonyspencer.blogspot.com/
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