[Vorbis] Why are file extensions bad?

[Monty]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 05:02:03PM +1200, John Morton wrote:
> I'm not sure that I understand why a distinct file extension for video is
> considered so bad.

Well, it's *not* in any practical way except one: IANA says that any
ogg content is application/ogg and its extension is .ogg.  That's
official, and we echo that.  On the OSes we use ouselves, that doesn't happen to be a liability.  Actually for nearly all users of any OS, it's not a liability either.  The average Mom & Pop user uses WiMP for everything, audio and video.

The power users are complaining that we're advocating something that
makes their lives difficult.  I find it amusing that the power users
are so adamant against any change to what they're doing right now.

> It seems to me that the minimum effort case of continuing to treat .ogg as a
> multimedia container that could have all sorts of things in it, but is
> probably just audio, and something like .ogv which means a stream containing
> primarily video will spare anyone from having to write and maintain multiple
> helper apps to overcome the problem of their being specialist video and audio
> players, while not causing any real problems down the road when the media
> players converge to playing both types as a matter of course.

Then by all means, use .ogv.  You'll end up with MIME association problems though.

> What am I missing?

The fact that this argument is all about ego, but I think you guessed
that already and was hoping it wasn't true :-)

Monty