how would you improve this file extension list

jackpot@lemmy.mlbanned from sitebanned from site to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 4 points –

(btw yes you can add new categories)

if you could standardise one file format for a task, what would it be:

  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 .tar.zst (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly)
  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
13

You are viewing a single comment
View all commentsShow the parent comment

It's actually the opposite. To my knowlegde, Windows is the only OS that I've used that uses the file extension to determine the contents, but then they hide it from the user. So maybe file extensions are only for windows?

How does osx know how to open a PDF not named .PDF?

The standard system in macOS is based on a Uniform Type Indicator, or UTI, like public.plain-text for a plain text file, and public.jpeg for a JPEG image.

To determine the file type, macOS uses MIME types when downloading from the Internet, can still use old Classic Mac OS four-character type codes, and ultimately relies on UTIs.

To get the UTI of a given file, use the mdls (meta data list, part of Spotlight) command in the Terminal.

Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Type_Identifier for more info.

PDFs have a MIME type of application/pdf per the spec, but you might still encounter some with MIME types like application/x-pdf. MacOS reads the MIME type of a file, then assigns the com.adobe.pdf UTI (if it wasn’t already assigned by another Mac application).