#formats

It is therefore my intention, through this article, to write a love letter to this data format, often criticized for the wrong reasons, even more so when it is somehow deemed "cool" to hate on it. My point is not, far from it, to say that CSV is a silver bullet but rather to shine a light on some of the format's sometimes overlooked strengths.

So, here is my thought experiment -- whenever you have the urge of building a custom file format, just don't.

So, here is my thought experiment -- whenever you have the urge of building a custom file format, just don't.

The WARC (Web ARChive) format specifies a method for combining multiple digital resources into an aggregate archival file together with related information. The WARC format is a revision of the Internet Archive's ARC File Format [ARC_IA] format that has traditionally been used to store "web crawls" as sequences of content blocks harvested from the World Wide Web. The WARC format generalizes the older format to better support the harvesting, access, and exchange needs of archiving organizations. Besides the primary content currently recorded, the revision accommodates related secondary content, such as assigned metadata, abbreviated duplicate detection events, and later-date transformations.

"here I am using radically different software, in a completely different world, and these pieces from my past are lost, irretrievable because of the formats used to save them (as well as the hardware on which they’re saved: it’s getting harder to read

"I finally got everything into a single archive in an open, stable format... and just 3 short years later, Apple found a way to screw me one last time."

"My CD-ROM is accessible only to cranks and connoisseurs, members of the "dead formats society" who've invested in the dead tech required to play it."

"The basic idea of OpenDoc was to create small single-purpose reusable components responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing or browsing an FTP server."