[vorbis] Why the commotion about file extensions?

[Tom Felker]

On Monday 14 July 2003 4:49 pm, Jens Prüfer wrote:
> Hello again,
>
> sorry for this endless discussion. I did not want to start a flame-war
> here.
>
> To sum it up: I really do not care what extensions you chose. I will never
> rely on them anyhow :)
>
> But please do not use the "_" (underscore) in the extension. It makes it
> clumsy and Windows-Users do not know what that funny letter is for anyhow
> and would probably put in blanks instead.
>
> A >3 letter extension will probably abreviated to 3 letters anyhow. Just
> think of .mpeg vs. .mpg files. So I guess you should stick to three
> letters, allthough four letters is much more elegant. After all: When has
> Windows been about elegance before ;)
>
> Ah, don't respond to that rhetorical question, please. Feel free to comment
> on alt.linux.sux ...
>
> Cheers
>
> Jens

I'm willing to forget about underscores (though they do make it more clear), 
but I really dislike the idea of being constrained to three letters.  No 
operating system in active use limits the length of extensions.  If we had 
always disregarded elegance, we'd still be stuck with 8.3 filenames, drive 
letters, \r\n, 512 MB (or 2.1 GB, or 32 GB...) partitions, and so on.  I 
think we should do something elegant, especially since it won't cause 
problems.

Also, Windows users don't type extensions.  They don't even see extensions, 
they are hidden by default.  Probably most of them barely know they exist.  
(see "[vorbis-dev] .ogg extentions")  If anything, we should be arguing about 
the color of the fish on Vorbis vs. Speex files.  Besides, Joe Sixpack 
doesn't like TLAs, and he'd probably like it if extensions were descriptive 
and easy to read.

To anyone else reading, what do you prefer?  (using Vorbis as an example)

.vorbis_ogg
.ogg_vorbis
.vorbisogg
.oggvorbis
.v_ogg
.ogg_v
.vogg
.oggv
.v_og
.og_v
.vog
.ogv
.vo1
.ov1
.v1o
A pink fish
<> =~ /OggS.........................vorbis/;
CmdrTaco associates my files
Other: (specify)


-- 
Tom Felker

Life is like an analogy.

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