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
That’s the idea, and while at it, we could also make .zip files a proper Web technology with browser support. At the moment ePub exists in this weird twilight where it is build out of mostly Web technology, yet isn’t actually part of the Web. Everything being packed into .zip files also means that you can’t link directly to the individual pages within an ePub, as HTTP doesn’t know how to unpack them. It’s all weird and messy and surprising that nobody has cleaned it all up and integrated it into the Web properly.
So far the original Microsoft Edge is the only browser I am aware of with native ePub support, but even that didn’t survive when they switched to Chrome’s Bink.
Microsoft Edge’s ePub reader was so good! I would have used it all the time for reading if it hadn’t met its demise. Is there no equivalent fork or project out there? The existing epub readers always have these quirks that annoy me to the point where I’ll just use Calibre’s built in reader which works well enough.
