Something that personally annoys me in Workbench is that it requires .info file to display an icon and determine which program to use to open a target file. I always found the Windows way of doing more natural; that is that file extensions are used to determine the type of file.
However I am really intrested to know what others thing about it and if anyone favours the use of .info files over the use of file extentions.
That's not strictly true. Workbench only shows files that have .info files by default. Choosing "show all files" will cause all the files that don't have dot info files to become visible.
Secondly, .info files only specify which action to take when the icon is opened. They aren't used to determine what the type the file is. That's the responsibility of tools like deficons. The latter use various rules, which can be as simple as matching the extension to checking for magic values within a file.
Showing file types based solely on their extension is not a good idea. It's fast, but it's also ambiguous, especially for the glut of three letter extensions that exist.
