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
  • raubarno ( raubarno@lemmy.ml ) 
    77·
    3 years ago

    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.

    • megane-kun ( megane_kun@lemm.ee ) 
      12·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • raubarno ( raubarno@lemmy.ml ) 
        8·
        3 years ago

        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…

        • megane-kun ( megane_kun@lemm.ee ) English
          3·
          3 years ago

          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.

  • Björn ( bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ) 
    64·
    3 years ago

    zip or 7z for compressed archives. I hate that for some reason rar has become the defacto standard for piracy. It’s just so bad.

    The other day I saw a tar.gz containing a multipart-rar which contained an iso which contained a compressed bin file with an exe to decompress it. Soooo unnecessary.

    Edit: And the decompressed game of course has all of its compressed assets in renamed zip files.

  • DigitalJacobin ( DigitalJacobin@lemmy.ml ) English
    57·
    3 years ago

    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 .zip and gzip/.gz) and does so faster.
      • By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.
      • .tar.xz is 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.zst can achieve a compression ratio pretty close to LZMA (used by .tar.xz and .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.

    • 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

      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.

    1. https://archlinux.org/news/now-using-zstandard-instead-of-xz-for-package-compression/ ↩︎

    2. https://tonisagrista.com/blog/2023/jpegxl-vs-avif/ ↩︎

    3. https://engineering.fb.com/2018/04/10/video-engineering/av1-beats-x264-and-libvpx-vp9-in-practical-use-case/ ↩︎

      • tal ( tal@lemmy.today ) 
        1·
        3 years ago

        .tar is pretty bad as it lacks in index, making it impossible to quickly seek around in the file.

        .tar.pixz/.tpxz has an index and uses LZMA and permits for parallel compression/decompression (increasingly-important on modern processors).

        https://github.com/vasi/pixz

        It’s packaged in Debian, and I assume other Linux distros.

        Only downside is that GNU tar doesn’t have a single-letter shortcut to use pixz as a compressor, the way it does “z” for gzip, “j” for bzip2, or “J” for xz (LZMA); gotta use the more-verbose “-Ipixz”.

        Also, while I don’t recommend it, IIRC gzip has a limited range that the effects of compression can propagate, and so even if you aren’t intentionally trying to provide random access, there is software that leverages this to hack in random access as well. I don’t recall whether someone has rigged it up with tar and indexing, but I suppose if someone were specifically determined to use gzip, one could go that route.

    • Laser ( Laser@feddit.de ) 
      7·
      3 years ago

      By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.

      The problem here being that GnuPG does nothing really well.

      Videos (Codec): AV1

      • Much more efficient than x264 (used by .mp4) and VP9[3].

      AV1 is also much younger than H264 (AV1 is a specification, x264 is an implementation), and only recently have software-encoders become somewhat viable; a more apt comparison would have been AV1 to HEVC, though the latter is also somewhat old nowadays but still a competitive codec. Unfortunately currently there aren’t many options to use AV1 in a very meaningful way; you can encode your own media with it, but that’s about it; you can stream to YouTube, but YouTube will recode to another codec.

      • DigitalJacobin ( DigitalJacobin@lemmy.ml ) English
        4·
        3 years ago

        The problem here being that GnuPG does nothing really well.

        Could you elaborate? I’ve never had any issues with gpg before and curious what people are having issues with.

        Unfortunately currently there aren’t many options to use AV1 in a very meaningful way; you can encode your own media with it, but that’s about it; you can stream to YouTube, but YouTube will recode to another codec.

        AV1 has almost full browser support (iirc) and companies like YouTube, Netflix, and Meta have started moving over to AV1 from VP9 (since AV1 is the successor to VP9). But you’re right, it’s still working on adoption, but this is moreso just my dreamworld than it is a prediction for future standardization.

          • tal ( tal@lemmy.today ) 
            0·
            3 years ago

            Encrypting Email

            Don’t. Email is insecure . Even with PGP, it’s default-plaintext, which means that even if you do everything right, some totally reasonable person you mail, doing totally reasonable things, will invariably CC the quoted plaintext of your encrypted message to someone else

            Okay, provide me with an open standard that is widely-used that provides similar functionality.

            It isn’t there. There are parties who would like to move email users into their own little proprietary walled gardens, but not a replacement for email.

            The guy is literally saying that encrypting email is unacceptable because it hasn’t been built from the ground up to support encryption.

            I mean, the PGP guys added PGP to an existing system because otherwise nobody would use their nifty new system. Hell, it’s hard enough to get people to use PGP as it is. Saying “well, if everyone in the world just adopted a similar-but-new system that is more-amenable to encryption, that would be helpful”, sure, but people aren’t going to do that.

            • Laser ( Laser@feddit.de ) 
              0·
              3 years ago

              The message to be taken from here is rather “don’t bother”, if you need secure communication use something else, if you’re just using it so that Google can’t read your mail it might be ok but don’t expect this solution to be secure or anything. It’s security theater for the reasons listed, but the threat model for some people is a powerful adversary who can spend millions on software to find something against you in your communication and controls at least a significant portion of the infrastructure your data travels through. Think about whistleblowers in oppressive regimes, it’s absolutely crucial there that no information at all leaks. There’s just no way to safely rely on mail + PGP for secure communication there, and if you’re fine with your secrets leaking at one point or another, you didn’t really need that felt security in the first place. But then again, you’re just doing what the blog calls LARPing in the first place.

    • jackpot ( jackpot@lemmy.ml ) BannedOP
      7·
      3 years ago
      • By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.

      wait so does it do all of those things?

      • DigitalJacobin ( DigitalJacobin@lemmy.ml ) English
        15·
        3 years ago

        So there’s a tool called tar that creates an archive (a .tar file. Then theres a tool called zstd that can be used to compress files, including .tar files, which then becomes a .tar.zst file. And then you can encrypt your .tar.zst file using a tool called gpg, which would leave you with an encrypted, compressed .tar.zst.gpg archive.

        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.

    • ronweasleysl ( ronweasleysl@lemmy.ml ) English
      2·
      3 years ago

      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…

  • IsoKiero ( IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz ) English
    33·
    3 years ago

    I don’t know what to pick, but something else than PDF for the task of transferring documents between multiple systems. And yes, I know, PDF has it’s strengths and there’s a reason why it’s so widely used, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

    Additionally all proprietary formats, specially ones who have gained enough users so that they’re treated like a standard or requirement if you want to work with X.

  • sunbeam60 ( sunbeam60@lemmy.one ) 
    33·
    3 years ago

    SQLite for all “I’m going to write my own binary format because I is haxor” jobs.

    There are some specific cases where SQLite isn’t appropriate (streaming). But broadly it fits in 99% of cases.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 ( sxan@midwest.social ) 
    25·
    3 years ago

    Resume information. There have been several attempts, but none have become an accepted standard.

    When I was a consultant, this was the one standard I longed for the most. A data file where I could put all of my information, and then filter and format it for each application. But ultimately, I wanted to be able to submit the information in a standardised format - without having to re-enter it endlessly into crappy web forms.

    I think things have gotten better today, but at the cost of a reliance on a monopoly (LinkedIn). And I’m not still in that sort of job market. But I think that desire was so strong it’ll last me until I’m in my grave.

  • glibg10b ( glibg10b@lemmy.ml ) 
    13·
    3 years ago

    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.

  • drwankingstein ( drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
    11·
    3 years ago

    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)