Re: MIME handling for common MS Windows attachments?

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Defaulting *.doc to ms-word is bad,

Agreed.

> but I see no harm in defaulting application/ms-word to MS Word (or
> something else that can understand these files).

And agreed.

> Could someone who uses stuff like that mail me a patch for
> mailcap.el?

I've now asked around, it seems things are not as easy as I thought.
If we discount the giant stuff such as StarOffice (and, of course, The
Real Thing on Windows-running Emacsen), a useful default can be
constructed.  There is an `mswordview' that can grok *some* of the
Word formats (only Word 97, I'm told.)  We need to do the following:

1) Look at the contents of the part, and see if it is something
   mswordview can grok (one should study mswordview source to see how
   this is done).

2) If yes, then invoke mswordview which will produce HTML.  Feed the
   resulting HTML to W3.

3) If mswordview cannot grok it, it displays a list of other programs, 
   which supposedly can.  We should look into using them.

Not a bright future, all in all.

The following information provided by Drazen Kacar <dave@srce.hr>:

> A more sticky issue is whether to default image/* to the un-free,
> but commonly installed xv, or to some free image viewing program.
[...]
> (Well, it isn't really a sticky issue, because we could default to
> free programs, and then use non-free programs as the backup default
> values if the free programs don't exist on the system.)

The trouble is that xv is much better than most of the other stuff out 
there, especially for 8bit displays.  Defaulting to free stuff might
be a politically good idea, but it's a lousy choice for users.

> What image viewing programs exist out there?

There is imlib/gtk-based gqview, then there's ee (Electric Eyes) (also
imlib-based), ImageMagick's display (it produces high quality display,
but it's very slow, making it unsuitable for MIME viewers).