Just going to leave this xkcd comic here.

Yes, you already know what it is.

I wish there was a more standardized open format for documents. And more people and software should use markdown/.md because you just don’t need anything fancier for most types of documents.

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
  • @raubarno@lemmy.ml says it best here. .odt is 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.

MKV It supports high-quality video and audio codecs, allowing for lossless compression and high-definition content. Also MKV supports chapter and menu functionality, making it suitable to rip DVD to MKV and store DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

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.

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.