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
  • kadu@lemmy.world
    322·
    1 year ago

    Having “double” extensions is a terrible convention for operating systems where extensions actually matter and users are used to them, like Windows.

    “.tar.xz” should be something like “.tarxz” or “.txz”

    • Longpork_afficianado@lemmy.nz
      24·
      1 year 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
          4·
          1 year 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?

            • DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              However, getting people used to double extensions is one quick way of increasing the success rate of attacks such as the infamous “.pdf.exe” invoice from an email attachment.

              Very good point. Though, i would argue that this would be much less of a problem if Windows stopped sometimes hiding file extensions.

              I can’t see how Windows’ convention is worse

              I don’t believe what you’re referring to is really a Windows versus Linux/Unix thing.

              If I zip a file, it doesn’t matter what it was in a previous life, it’s now a zip - this is also how Unix deals with many filetypes, I’ve never seen a .h264.mp4 file, even though the .mp4 container can actually represent different types of encoding.

              I disagree, but i do get what you’re saying here. I don’t think that example really works though, because a .mp4 file isn’t derived from a .h264 file. A .mp4 is a container that may include h264-encoded video, but it may also have a channel with Opus-encoded audio or something. It’s apples and oranges.

              Also, even though there shouldn’t be any technical issues with this on Windows, you can still use a typical short filename suffix if you wish, though i would argue that using the long filename suffix is more expressive. From “tar (computing)” on Wikipedia:

              Compressor Long Short
              bzip2 .tar.bz2 .tb2, .tbz, .tbz2, .tz2
              gzip .tar.gz .taz, .tgz
              lzip .tar.lz
              lzma .tar.lzma .tlz
              lzop .tar.lzo
              xz .tar.xz .tx
              compress .tar.Z .tZ, .taZ
              zstd .tar.zst .tzst
                • Ferk@lemmy.ml
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  I think part of the reason why the long extension is often preferred is because it’s much clearer and it’s guaranteed to be supported and decompressed by the respective tools. Even when they don’t suppot tar archives, they’ll just give you the uncompressed tar in that case.

                  It’s also very common to do that with other extensions (not just .tar) when compressing big files. For example, when archiving logs they’ll often be stored as .log.gz, which makes it automatically clear that it’s a log file directly compressed with gzip and meant to be examined with tools like zcat and zless to view it.

                  And in cases like that you really need it to be clear on what data does the gzip stores, since it does not keep metadata about the file so you might not be able to get back the original name/extension of the file if you rename the gz file.

    • Gamma@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
          1 year 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.