if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?
e.g. flac for lossless audio because…
(yes you can add new categories)
summary:
- photos .jxl
- open domain image data .exr
- videos .av1
- lossless audio .flac
- lossy audio .opus
- subtitles srt/ass
- fonts .otf
- container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
- plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
- documents .odt
- archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
- configuration files toml
- typesetting typst
- interchange format .ora
- models .gltf / .glb
- daw session files .dawproject
- otdr measurement results .xml
If we’re being entirely honest just about everything in the zstd ecosystem needs some basic UX love. Working with .tar.zst files in any GUI is an exercise in frustration as well.
I think they recently implemented support for chunked decoding so reading files inside a zstd archive (like, say, seeking to read inside tar files) should start to improve sooner or later but some of the niceties we expect from compressed archives aren’t entirely there yet.
Fantastic compression though!