> Applications that simply go by the extension name are doing it
wrong and
> should be fixed. As it has already be pointed out there are better ways.
Take an application such as nautilus. AFAIK, nautilus (or gnome-vfs, or
whatever) used to look inside each file to determine what mime type it
was, in order to display it alongside the name and attach an icon. This
was very slow, since it had to open each file in a directory.
Can't comment for gnome. I never use it if I can help it. But in KDE this
doesn't seem to be an issue. konqueror can open directories with many files
and, as far as I can tell, determines their type almost instantly (at least
from my perception it is very very fast).
Maybe gnome could learn from KDE ;)
Chris