Talk:1301: File Extensions

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The title text reference of "hand-aligned data" may refer to ASCII art. 108.162.215.28 05:36, 9 December 2013 (UTC) Alan K.

I think it's also a notable point, that the better rated document formats are more data centric while the low rated formats mix text informations with design elements and finally become pure graphic formats, which often is an indication, that the author didn't use the accurate file type for (mostly) pure text informations. Something I don't understand is the gap between jpg and jpeg. The first suffix is AFAIK only an abbreviation used by older DOS/MS Systems to fullfill the 8.3 limitation for filenames. The note about hand alignment might concern the fact, that hand alignment is more time expensive which might increase the amount of the the author spend in overthink the content before layouting. Also often automated layouting as supported by many modern writing application might lead to unexpected and sometimes wrong results, because the automatism has no semantical knowledge about the authors intention, which might lead to post processed errors Sorry for my bad english, I'm not a natural writer 108.162.231.239 05:45, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

"hand-aligned data" seems to me like (manually) space-indented paragraphs, perhaps even manual padding to achieve the desired justification (centering and right-and-left-margin-hugging). And of course neatly lining up an 'embedded table', perhaps originally extracted from a .csv output. Although a number of plain-text editors (in the days of CGA and pure terminal/fixedspace fonts) or text formatters and wrappers (e.g. Lynx, man-page creaters, etc) would do things like this for you. And still do. At least insofar as the justification and margining is concerned. 141.101.99.229 08:35, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

If anyone has taken the time to hand align a text file (as in a README, or other info file), they want it to look attractive for people to read. Odd are you're not going to take the time to "hand pretty" the document just to be malicious. Back in the BBS days there were a large number of "online" groups who had "signature" text files which were (very probably) hand aligned, and made extensive use of extended ASCII codes to generate basic graphics. (Granted there were programs to help auto-generate "ascii art".) If you've ever seen these files you'd know. [Example 1] - [Example 2] Jarod997 (talk) 14:14, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I find it interesting that .jpg and .jpeg are at different levels. Aren't those the same thing? --Mralext20 (talk) 05:48, 9 December 2013 (UTC) Perhaps the .gif could contain suddenly unexpected scary/surprising frames? 108.162.208.172 14:54, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

That JPG/JPEG thing indeed seems strange. The more important distinction is between JPEGs that are photographs (fine) and those that are not (stupid). Also, pre-PNG, non-photograph GIFs could be just fine. And with all the accounting scandals we've seen, why would those spreadsheet formats get any credibility? -- Dfeuer (talk) 06:06, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
Alongside .jpeg ('full' extension format) and .jpg (MS '8.3'-compatible extension format), I'd have expected .jpe (often full extension historically truncated on an 8.3 system), I must be honest. (And interesting that .docx doesn't co-inhabit the .doc line... or be somewhere else.) And the disparity betwixt the two versions of JPEG extension may relate to the tendency for a higher artefact-intensity of images back in the early days (when a better option than GIFs for... certain pictures... e.g. on Usenet between *nix workstations with vastly restricted bandwidths and storage capacities) compared to today's users (cameras that regularly store 10+MP pictures in low-loss JFIF files, and/or in Raw format!). But that may be a spurious or off-track reasoning on my part. 141.101.99.229 08:27, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I measured the bars in photoshop to +/- 2pixels. If we scale .tex to a value of 100 like the transcript says, these are the values I get for the bar lengths (rounded to one decimal place) .tex 100 .pdf 89.4 .csv 84.9 .txt 66.5 .svg 64.8 .xls 48.6 .doc 21.2 .png 15.1 .ppt 14.5 .jpg 3.4 .jpeg -8.4 .gif -35.8

Dunno if it is helpful - or even trusted given I'm a first time commenter - but there it is. Closer values than just estimating, though the eyeballed estimates aren't bad. Not going to adjust the actual transcript because I feel that's overstepping my bounds. 108.162.216.56 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Not at all, wikis are free to edit for a reason. If we didn't want new users to be editing pages, we could have turned that off long ago. Davidy²²[talk] 07:55, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

As the information that is provided by the graph comes as png, we should probably not trust her. --141.101.92.120 09:03, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Ha, +1 Like :-) Spongebog (talk)

I never saw image of cute cats lying to me ... I mean, the gif is STILL the preferred format for animation, mostly because it's the only one supported. Animation formats based on PNG didn't catched up, hard to say why ... on the other hand, gif animation apparently have huge number of weird extensions, judging by the number of animated images I found which don't render properly in anything EXCEPT the browser. -- Hkmaly (talk) 10:27, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

The cute cat may not be lying, but since the format is used in other context -- like banner ads, then the average GIF may well be lying, also I believe there have been many security issues with GIFs and JPGs as they have been used as an attack vector for internet-bad-guys to take over your computer -- so while security issues is not specifically the topic for todays strip, then that may be worth noticing as well Spongebog (talk)
It is also possible to create animations with svg which is (for good reason, I like that format) ranked higher. Especially for scientific purposes it can be handy. Unfortunately is the MediaWiki software unable to show them. For example in the previous comic is an animation of the Galilean moons shown. That is an gif but someone also uploaded an svg animation and I would say it does look smoother than the gif. 108.162.231.215 14:40, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
The Grumpy Cat is not grumpy in real life - so cat pictures DO lie! Schmammel (talk) 15:40, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

What is the scale of the chart? Does 'top' = most trusted'? Never assume anything with xkcd. David.windsor (talk) 18:29, 9 December 2013 (UTC) Of course Randall does not really think that the file extension determines trustworthiness; the graph is tongue-in-cheek. Information can be trustworthy or untrustworthy no matter the format it's given in. 108.162.216.221 18:50, 9 December 2013 (UTC)