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October 2004
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2004.10.04 11:29 "Re: BigTIFF extension issue", by Rob Tillaart
Hi, my drop of oil on the fire: There were days when extentions were unique. Now there are so many applications that the three letter extention space seems too small, many TLA's are used double or triple giving rise to all kind of trouble. E.g. Windows can associate an application with the extention. If an file extention is re-used by another application meaningfull associations get lost. What is the purpose of extentions: - Extentions are a first line of help to inform a user of the filetype. - Ultimately applications decide if they can/will work with some file. Some decide this on ext. other on internal content of the file. (I like the unix file command in this context). If we 'overload' the extention ".tif", we help the user as they will assume correctly it is an image file. If we introduce a new (especially cryptic e.g. .tf8) extention the users do not associate it with an imageformat. Maybe when the new extention is descriptive enough. e.g. .bigtif (english speaking) users will understand it. Lucky for us most OS's today can work with long extentions. However seen a lot of discussion on this topic I currently prefer to stick with the ".tif" extention, as users will associate correctly with it. Application should hide the details of the implementations. regards, rob