if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?
e.g. flac for lossless audio because…
(yes you can add new categories)
summary:
- photos .jxl
- open domain image data .exr
- videos .av1
- lossless audio .flac
- lossy audio .opus
- subtitles srt/ass
- fonts .otf
- container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
- plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
- documents .odt
- archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
- configuration files toml
- typesetting typst
- interchange format .ora
- models .gltf / .glb
- daw session files .dawproject
- otdr measurement results .xml
Most mods on Nexus are in rar or zip. Also most game cracks; or as iso, which is even worse.
I have seen RAR on Nexus, but I wouldn't say that it's common, at least for Bethesda's games, which is where I've seen it.
Things may have changed, but I recall that yenc (for ASCII encoding), RAR (for compression and segmenting) and PAR2 (for redundancy) were something of a standard for binary distribution on Usenet, and that's probably the main place I've seen RAR. I think that the main selling point there was that it was just a format that was widely-available that supported segmented files.
That would explain why I don't see them often. I haven't been very active in gaming as of late, let alone modding. And I generally don't pirate games. I'm cool with people that do, I just don't personally. (Virus fears, being out of the loop long enough that I don't know any good sites, etc)
Honestly, if desktop operating systems supported better sandboxing of malware, I bet that piracy would increase.