"Wolf K" wrote

| Bottom line: it's way past time for standards. There's no reason for
| different OSs to handle filetype/tagging/etc differently.
|

I wonder if it's too late for that. Or maybe too early.
Developments go at such a fast pace, and most of it
is now commercial.

Example: I noticed that Bitcoin programming uses a
..DAT extension. That's a common extension on
Windows for undefined data files. Typically they're
custom format, used privately by software. They
might contain anything. The Bitcoin people apparently
didn't know or didn't care.

JPG is a semi-standard only because it compresses
well and it's royaslty-free. But it's a terrible image
format. The compression degrades the image! Yet JPG
is used to store images in cameras because all
computers will recognize it. Meanwhile the JPG header
is a mess. It's like a toilet stall in a public bathroom
where everyone and his brother have added their
2 cents.

Any "standards" we have in tech are often partly
created by small, well-intentioned groups of insiders
who want to improve how things work (often in an
atmosphere of seat-of-the-pants urgency). But those
groups have their own values and their own priorities.

So the obvious question becomes: Who is going to
be in charge to establish standards and decide on
priorities? And what happens to commercial entities that
stand to lose? For instance, camera companies that
have to remake their hardware/software in order to
store some universal format to replace JPG, that
everyone agrees on... at least this year. There's rarely
standardization in commerical products unless it
favors the sellers. It usually doesn't.