On 2017-12-14 14:21:12 +0000, Wolf K said:

On 2017-12-14 00:24, Your Name wrote:
On 2017-12-14 03:16:11 +0000, Wolf K said:

On 2017-12-13 19:37, Your Name wrote:
[...]
* ... you can't rely on the OS to do that since a JPEG image file can
actually be opened in a text editor as the file's data, even if it's
rarely useful to do so.

That's what Open With is for.

Open With is near useless if you don't know what the file actually is.
You'd have to Open With with every app you have until you found one
that could open it properly.

If we're talking about user convenience, I agree, showing a file's type
as part of the filename is very useful. (But IMO a three-letter
extension is too limited). There are many other useful conventions, eg,
in icon design. These are converging on a common standard.

I don't know about Windows, but Mac OS X can have at least four letter
extensions (.tiff, .jpeg, .html for example).

Perhaps a bigger issue is using the "." character as the separator
(although some OSes apparently use a space instead, which is even
worse).



If we're talking about choosing a program to open a file, extenions
aren't needed. It would be easy to ensure that Open With offers only
programs that can open a given file without reference to an extension.
Just standardise metadata (eg, as a series of slots, some which must be
filled, others for dev or user options). Easy peasy.

Perhaps, but that means establishing another new "standard" for
developers to follow (not all files currently have such data within
them). It also means the OS has to physically read the files to find
out what they are, which maybe isn't so much of an issue with today's
fast CPUs and storage drives, but could be for those using server-based
storage via slow (or data capped) network / internet connections.

BUT,
Microsoft can't stick to anyone else's standard and always tries to
make up their own ideas and then force everyone else to follow them.
Internet Explorer being an obvious example that caused many headaches
for web developers thanks to using it's own silly ideas rather than the
establised HTML standard.