(btw yes you can add new categories)

if you could standardise one file format for a task, what would it be:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files .tar.zst (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly)
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
  • hedgehog
    4·
    11 months ago

    The standard system in macOS is based on a Uniform Type Indicator, or UTI, like public.plain-text for a plain text file, and public.jpeg for a JPEG image.

    To determine the file type, macOS uses MIME types when downloading from the Internet, can still use old Classic Mac OS four-character type codes, and ultimately relies on UTIs.

    To get the UTI of a given file, use the mdls (meta data list, part of Spotlight) command in the Terminal.

    Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Type_Identifier for more info.

    PDFs have a MIME type of application/pdf per the spec, but you might still encounter some with MIME types like application/x-pdf. MacOS reads the MIME type of a file, then assigns the com.adobe.pdf UTI (if it wasn’t already assigned by another Mac application).