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When the original application is open source, its format is public and anyone who wants to create a converter to another format can either use the original code
by AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
When the original application is open source, its format is public and anyone who wants to create a converter to another format can either use the original code or inspect it to see how the format works.
When the format is proprietary, you get a blob of binary data that you have to reverse engineer through guesswork, made orders of magnitude more difficult if the original service isn't even available anymore.
- est 3mo agoThe problem reminds me of pdf, the format is well known, there are tons of third-party readers, but they all glitch somewhat differently. Also PDF is turing complete. Modern rich content formats are hard. Open formats solves only small part of the problem. I think the universal interchangable format is static HTML.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo agoPDF is a mess because it's an ancient originally-proprietary format based on a proprietary language and the Adobe "standard" didn't actually specify a lot of important things for a long time, leaving other implementations to try to reverse engineer them. Meanwhile you look at actual standard formats like PNG or UTF-8 or, as you say, HTML, and the implementations generally do a lot better because there is a proper spec.