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:
- photos .jxl
- open domain image data .exr
- videos .av1
- lossless audio .flac
- lossy audio .opus
- subtitles srt/ass
- fonts .otf
- container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
- plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
- documents .odt
- archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
- configuration files toml
- typesetting typst
- interchange format .ora
- models .gltf / .glb
- daw session files .dawproject
- otdr measurement results .xml
Open Document Standard (.odt) for all documents. In all public institutions (it’s already a NATO standard for documents).
Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.
Actually, IMHO, there should be some better alternative to .odt as well. Something more out of a declarative/scripted fashion like LaTeX but still WYSIWYG. LaTeX (and XeTeX, for my use cases) is too messy for me to work with, especially when a package is Byzantine. And it can be non-reproducible if I share/reuse the same document somewhere else.
Something has to be made with document files.
It is unbelievable we do not have standard document format.
What’s messed up is that, technically, we do. Originally, OpenDocument was the ISO standard document format. But then, baffling everyone, Microsoft got the ISO to also have
.docxas an ISO standard. So now we have 2 competing document standards, the second of which is simply worse.
I was too young to use it in any serious context, but I kinda dig how WordPerfect does formatting. It is hidden by default, but you can show them and manipulate them as needed.
It might already be a thing, but I am imagining a LaTeX-based standard for document formatting would do well with a WYSIWYG editor that would hide the complexity by default, but is available for those who need to manipulate it.
There are programs (LyX, TexMacs) that implement WYSIWYG for LaTeX, TexMacs is exceptionally good. I don’t know about the standards, though.
Another problem with LaTeX and most of the other document formats is that they are so bloated and depend on many other tasks that it is hardly possible to embed the tool into a larger document. That’s a bit of criticism for UNIX design philosophy, as well. And LaTeX code is especially hard to make portable.
There used to be a similar situation with PDFs, it was really hard to display a PDF embedded in application. Finally, Firefox pdf.js came in and solved that issue.
The only embedded and easy-to-implement standard that describes a ‘document’ is HTML, for now (with Javascript for scripting). Only that it’s not aware of page layout. If only there’s an extension standard that could make a HTML page into a document…
I was actually thinking of something like markdown or HTML forming the base of that standard. But it’s almost impossible (is it?) to do page layout with either of them.
But yeah! What I was thinking when I mentioned a LaTeX-based standard is to have a base set of “modules” (for a lack of a better term) that everyone should have and that would guarantee interoperability. That it’s possible to create a document with the exact layout one wants with just the base standard functionality. That things won’t be broken when opening up a document in a different editor.
There could be additional modules to facilitate things, but nothing like the 90’s proprietary IE tags. The way I’m imagining this is that the additional modules would work on the base modules, making things slightly easier but that they ultimately depend on the base functionality.
IDK, it’s really an idea that probably won’t work upon further investigation, but I just really like the idea of an open standard for documents based on LaTeX (kinda like how HTML has been for web pages), where you could work on it as a text file (with all the tags) if needed.
Bro, trying to give padding in Ms word, when you know… YOU KNOOOOW… they can convert to html. It drives me up the wall.
And don’t get me started on excel.
Kill em all, I say.
This is the kind of thing i think about all the time so i have a few.
- Archive files:
.tar.zst- Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by
.zipandgzip/.gz) and does so faster. - By separating the jobs of archiving (
.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg),.tar.zstfollows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”. .tar.xzis also very good and seems more popular (probably since it was released 6 years earlier in 2009), but, when tuned to it’s maximum compression level,.tar.zstcan achieve a compression ratio pretty close to LZMA (used by.tar.xzand.7z) and do it faster[1].zstd and xz trade blows in their compression ratio. Recompressing all packages to zstd with our options yields a total ~0.8% increase in package size on all of our packages combined, but the decompression time for all packages saw a ~1300% speedup.
- Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by
- Image files:
JPEG XL/.jxl- “Why JPEG XL”
- Free and open format.
- Can handle lossy images, lossless images, images with transparency, images with layers, and animated images, giving it the potential of being a universal image format.
- Much better quality and compression efficiency than current lossy and lossless image formats (
.jpeg,.png,.gif). - Produces much smaller files for lossless images than AVIF[2]
- Supports much larger resolutions than AVIF’s 9-megapixel limit (important for lossless images).
- Supports up to 24-bit color depth, much more than AVIF’s 12-bit color depth limit (which, to be fair, is probably good enough).
- Videos (Codec):
AV1- Free and open format.
- Much more efficient than x264 (used by
.mp4) and VP9[3].
- Documents:
OpenDocument / ODF / .odt- @[email protected] says it best here.
.odtis simply a better standard than.docx.
it’s already a NATO standard for documents Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.
- @[email protected] says it best here.
- By separating the jobs of archiving (
.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg),.tar.zstfollows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.
wait so does it do all of those things?
So there’s a tool called tar that creates an archive (a
.tarfile. Then theres a tool called zstd that can be used to compress files, including.tarfiles, which then becomes a.tar.zstfile. And then you can encrypt your.tar.zstfile using a tool called gpg, which would leave you with an encrypted, compressed.tar.zst.gpgarchive.Now, most people aren’t doing everything in the terminal, so the process for most people would be pretty much the same as creating a ZIP archive.
- By separating the jobs of archiving (
I get better compression ratio with xz than zstd, both at highest. When building an Ubuntu squashFS
Zstd is way faster though
Damn didn’t realize that JXL was such a big deal. That whole JPEG recompression actually seems pretty damn cool as well. There was some noise about GNOME starting to make use of JXL in their ecosystem too…
wait im confusrd whats the differenc ebetween .tar.zst and .tar.xz
Different ways of compressing the initial
.tararchive.deleted by creator
Sounds like a Windows problem
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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?
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There already are conventional abbreviations: see Section 2.1. I doubt they will be better supported by tools though.
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is av1 lossy
AV1 can do lossy video as well as lossless video.
- Archive files:
Literally any file format except PDF for documents that need to be edited. Fuck Adobe and fuck Acrobat
Data output from manufacturing equipment. Just pick a standard. JSON works. TOML / YAML if you need to write as you go. Stop creating your own format that’s 80% JSON anyways.
I don’t give a shit which debugging format any platform picks, but if they could each pick one that every emulator reads and every compiler emits, that’d be fucking great.
Even more simpler, I’d really like if we could just unify whether or not
is needed for variables, and pick#or//for comments. I’m sick of breaking my brain when I flip between languages because of these stupid nuance inconsistencies.Don’t forget
;is a comment in assembly.For extra fun, did you know
//wasn’t standardized until C99? Comments in K&R C are all/* */. Possibly the most tedious commending format ever devised./* */is used in CSS as well, I think.Also we’ve got VB (and probably BASIC) out there using
'because why not lol[EDIT] I stand corrected by another comment
REMis what BASIC uses. DOS batch files use that, too. They’re old though, maybe we give them a pass “it’s okay grampa, let’s get you back to the museum” 🤣 (disclaimer: I am also old, don’t worry)
It does not work like that.
is required in shell languages because they have quoteless strings and need to be super concise when calling commands.#and//are valid identifiers in many languages and all of them are well beyond the point of no return. My suggestion is to make use of your editor’s “turn this line into line comment” function and stop remembering them by yourself.
That just sounds impossible given the absolute breadth of all platforms and architectures though.
One per-thing is fine.
I’d like an update to the epub ebook format that leverages zstd compression and jpeg-xl. You’d see much better decompression performance (especially for very large books,) smaller file sizes and/or better image quality. I’ve been toying with the idea of implementing this as a .zpub book format and plugin for KOReader but haven’t written any code for it yet.
XML for machine-readable data because I live to cause chaosEither markdown or Org for human-readable text-only documents. MS Office formats and the way they are handled have been a mess since the 2007 -x versions were introduced, and those and Open Document formats are way too bloated for when you only want to share a presentable text file.
While we’re at it, standardize the fucking markdown syntax! I still have nightmares about Reddit’s degenerate four-space-indent code blocks.
.gltf/.glb for models. It’s way less of a headache than .obj and .dae, while also being way more feature rich than either.
Either that or .blend, because some things other than blender already support it and it’d make my life so much easier.
matroska for media, we already have MKA for audio and MKV for video. An image container would be good too.
mp4 is more prone to data loss and slower to parse, while also being less flexible, despite this it seems to be a sort of pseudo standard.
(MP4, M4A, HEIF formats like heic, avif)
wait why not av4 or jpegxl
those are media formats, not containers.
im compiling summarised list in body, what do i put this under and what file extensions
JPEG XL for images because it compresses better than JPEG, PNG and WEBP most of the time.
XZ because it theoretically offers the highest compression ratio in most circumstances, and long decompression time isn’t really an issue when the alternative is downloading a larger file over a slow connection.
Config files stored as serialized data structures instead of in plain text. This speeds up read times and removes the possibility of syntax or type errors. Also, fuck JSON.
I wish there were a good format for typesetting. Docx is closed and inflexible. LaTeX is unreadable, inefficient to type and hard to learn due to the inconsistencies that arise from its reliance on third-party packages and its lack of guidelines for their design.
TOML for configuration files
100% this. Much more readable than JSON, YAML or other custom formats.
Markdown for all rich text that doesn’t need super fancy shit like latex
which markdown implementation tho ?
Oh I’m not brave enough for politics.
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I’d argue asciidoc is better, but less well known
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Definitely FLAC for audio because it’s lossless, if you record from a high fidelity source…
exFAT for external hard drives and SD cards because both Windows and Mac can read and write to it as well as Linux. And you don’t have the permission pain…
What permission pain?
If you were to format the drive with extra and then copy something to it from Linux - if you try open it on another Linux machine (eg you distro hop after this event) it won’t open the file because your aren’t the owner.
Then you have to jump though hoops trying to make yourself the owner just so you can open your own file.
I learnt this the hard way so I just use exFAT and it all works.
i hate to be that guy, but pick the right tool for the right job. use markdown for a readme and latex for a research paper. you dont need to create ‘the ultimate file format’ that can do both, but worse and less compatible
Some sort of machine-readable format for invoices and documents with related purposes (offers, bills of delivery, receipts,…) would be useful to get rid of some more of the informal paper or PDF human-readable documents we still use a lot. Ideally something JSON-based, perhaps with a cryptographic signature and encryption layer around it.
