if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?

e.g. flac for lossless audio because…

(yes you can add new categories)

summary:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
        • Longpork_afficianado@lemmy.nz
          19·
          9 months ago

          But it’s not a tarxz, it’s an xz containing a tar, and you perform operations from right to left until you arrive back at the original files with whatever extensions they use.

          If I compress an exe into a zip, would you expect that to be an exezip? No, you expect it to be file.exe.zip, informing you(and your system) that this file should first be unzipped, and then should be executed.

            • DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
              2·
              9 months ago

              I get the frustration, but Windows is the one that strayed from convention/standard.

              Also, i should’ve asked this earlier, but doesn’t Windows also only look at the characters following the last dot in the filename when determining the file type? If so, then this should be fine for Windows, since there’s only one canonical file extension at a time, right?

        • Gamma@programming.devEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          I get your point. Since a .tar.zst file can be handled natively by tar, using .tzst instead does make sense.

        • sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
          51·
          9 months ago

          I would argue what windows does with the extensions is a bad idea. Why do you think engineers should do things in favour of these horrible decisions the most insecure OS is designed with?

            • jaaval@sopuli.xyz
              1·
              9 months ago

              In this case it really seems this windows convention is bad though. It is uninformative. And abbreviations mandate understanding more file extensions for no good reason. And I say this as primarily a windows user. Hiding file extensions was always a bad idea. It tries to make a simple reduced UI in a place where simple UI is not desirable. If you want a lean UI you should not be handling files directly in the first place.

              Example.zip from the other comment is not a compressed .exe file, it’s a compressed archive containing the exe file and some metadata. Windows standard tools would be in real trouble trying to understand unarchived compressed files many programs might want to use for logging or other data dumps. And that means a lot of software use their own custom extensions that neither the system nor the user knows what to do with without the original software. Using standard system tools and conventions is generally preferable.