That's literally just spelling. The exact same pictures could have been added to the document in 1994, only the file format changed.
People keep doing this, as others have observed. And they always get stuck in the same place, they can make different raster image formats work, although each time this happens they find there are fewer anybody cares about, and they can do the same trick with PCM audio, although again not many options anybody cares about (MP3 is about as exciting as you get these days) and then they run out of steam.
This is not a rich seam of unexplored possibilities, it's a small hole in the ground that people keep clambering down into - certain they'll find treasure and then disappointed when it is in fact just a small hole in the ground.
No, it's not "literally just spelling". It is additional manual steps vs. having the computer do things for us.
You keep arguing for inconveniencing users and developers, who still need the conversion tools anyway, to avoid standardising the conversion tools. It makes absolutely no sense.
Yes, it is. You don't even try to pretend otherwise, the format isn't delivering new semantics here. The existence of the extra formats that caused Datatypes to be created is an artefact of history, like TIFF, and best left there.
> It is additional manual steps vs. having the computer do things for us.
"Having the computer do it" for every format in every program incurs an unending maintenance and security burden for all systems across all time, whereas lift-and-shift averts that.
> You keep arguing for inconveniencing users and developers
You have chosen to inflict misery on yourself, I don't have any part in that.
> It makes absolutely no sense.
And yet I suppose that today you will continue as before, blaming others for things you choose, and perhaps lamenting that whichever bunch of crooks currently own "Amiga" aren't shovelling more money into the pit.
> Yes, it is. You don't even try to pretend otherwise, the format isn't delivering new semantics here. The existence of the extra formats that caused Datatypes to be created is an artefact of history, like TIFF, and best left there.
The formats exist and are being used, and new ones keep being created. That is the problem. You can keep pretending we don't need to deal with them. Maybe you don't, but I do have to deal with format conversion on a daily basis, as I don't live in a fantasy world where everyone chooses to use the formats I would prefer.
> "Having the computer do it" for every format in every program incurs an unending maintenance and security burden for all systems across all time, whereas lift-and-shift averts that.
Having the computer do it for every format in every program in terms of the actual conversion is exactly what we have today because of the lack of use of things like datatypes. On top of that we have piles of conversion tools to deal with moving data between programs that don't implement the same set of formats.
What we're lacking is automation and deduplication of effort.
There's no added security concern here to automating the execution of code we already execute.
If anything avoiding crappy reimplementation of formats all over the place would be a substantial reduction in complexity and make it easier to actually put in the effort to produce something more robust.
Meanwhile what you're engaged in is meaningless sophistry given that your proposed solution of just getting rid of these formats is not an option available to us.
> And yet I suppose that today you will continue as before, blaming others for things you choose, and perhaps lamenting that whichever bunch of crooks currently own "Amiga" aren't shovelling more money into the pit.
I don't care who currently own Amiga. It's entirely irrelevant to this conversation.
But your non-solution does not become any more of a solution whether or not I get the time to do something about my workflows.
That's literally just spelling. The exact same pictures could have been added to the document in 1994, only the file format changed.
People keep doing this, as others have observed. And they always get stuck in the same place, they can make different raster image formats work, although each time this happens they find there are fewer anybody cares about, and they can do the same trick with PCM audio, although again not many options anybody cares about (MP3 is about as exciting as you get these days) and then they run out of steam.
This is not a rich seam of unexplored possibilities, it's a small hole in the ground that people keep clambering down into - certain they'll find treasure and then disappointed when it is in fact just a small hole in the ground.
It's the Oak Island money pit of technologies.