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
It’s a 30 year old format, and large amounts of research and innovation in lossy audio compression have occurred since then. Opus can achieve better quality in like 40% the bitrate. Also, the format is, much like zip, a mess of partially broken implementations in the early days (although now everyone uses LAME so not as big of a deal). Its container/stream format is very messy too. Also no native tag format so it needs ID3 tags which don’t enforce any standardized text encoding.