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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

Just dealing with file extensions is enough of a head spin. We stopped trying to differentiate between .xls, .xlsx, *.xlst... etc. to show an Excel icon for a file uploaded to our SaaS and just went with a generic file icon in the end.

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That sounds like the classic example of a decorative feature that someone thought, "oh that sounds easy, add it to someone's sprint." But of course turns out to be mind numbingly complex.

Honest question, why is that feature complex? What is the problem in looking at last part after dot?

Because Microsoft made their new office extension .xml if that doesn't make your head spin i don't know what else will.

I mean, this is only adding another entry to your array of extensions for the specific icon. It's also not a deal-braker if it doesn't work. It really is easy, I don't see what's the problem.

Maybe because it is used for all kinds of office documents. You'd have to look at the contents to see if it's a spreadsheet, text document, presentation or not even a non office pain XML file

Is this in very recent Office versions? Or are you talking about the XML format used by Office 2007 upwards? Because that does still use different file extensions for different programs, obtained by adding an 'x' on their old binary format extensions (.docx rather than .doc, .xlsx rather than .xls, ...). They're zip archives of XML files rather than individual XML files so .xml wouldn't make any sense.

I got the impression the problem in the comment above was too many extensions rather than too few. For example, you have use .docm etc rather than .docx if your document contains macros otherwise Word will refuse to open it (this is a security feature to prevent document viruses). But it sounds like there are many others.

If this is a head spin, then go take a stroll on a Debian package mirror for what kinds of awesome ^W bizarre file extension combos they've come up with. This one is my favorite: https://twitter.com/stefanmajewsky/status/928983817825665025

Only on Windows.

On the contrary, if one is on Windows this stuff is actually much easier to handle, as the operating system supplies out of the box a large, extensible and maintained by installed applications, table of extensions, with an indirect mapping (via an intermediate) to display icons supplied in that very same table.

The ASSOC .DOCX command shows an example of the first leg of the indirect mapping.

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