Also renamed xml, renamed json and renamed sqlite.
SQLite explicitly encourages using it as an on-disk binary format. The format is well-documented and well-supported, backwards compatible (there’s been no major version changes since 2004), and the developers have promised to support it at least until the year 2050. It has quick seek times if your data is properly indexed, the SQLite library is distributed as a single C file that you can embed directly into your app, and it’s probably the most tested library in the world, with something like 500x more test code than library code.
Unless you’re a developer that really understands the intricacies of designing a binary data storage format, it’s usually far better to just use SQLite.
Amateurs.
I have evolved from using file extensions, and instead, don’t use any extension!
I don’t even use a file system on my storage drives. I just write the file contents raw and try to memorize where.
Sounds tedious, I’ve just been keeping everything in memory so I don’t have to worry about where it is.
Linux mostly doesn’t use file extensions… It relies on “magic bytes” in the file.
Same with the web in general - it relies purely on MIME type (e.g. text/html
for HTML files) and doesn’t care about extensions at all.
“Magic bytes”? We just called them headers, back in my day (even if sometimes they are at the end of the file)