Why would any of those applications need to support
it? File
extensions
are archaic, a dying anachronism in today's world
of file magic and/or
MIME types. Let them go.
[snip]
The disadvantage is that they are arbitrary, and convey almost no
useful
information about the actual contents of the file.
And, to bring up
an
odd anti-example, would you have us rename a
Theora+Vorbis file from
.ogv to .oga just because we deleted the Theora stream? That would be
like having a dozen extensions for PNG images just to indicate which
chunks are used.
If file extensions are archaic, and convey almost no useful information
about the actual contents of the file, then why use file extensions at
all? Why not let people name files whatever they want, and just like
MIME types always figure it out?
I completely agree that using file extensions to tell an application
what type of file it is using is archaic, but saying the file extension
is useless for humans is an error in judgment. When you don't have an
application to tell you immediately what kind of file a file is, it is
extremely useful to have a file extension to at least give you a rough
guess.
If extensions weren't useful, they would no longer exist.
V/r,
Ryan Lane