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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

I know that the real reason is a requirement for length 3 combined with a slight preference for vowel elision, but I just realized that if one were so inclined it could be interpreted as a snub.

Joint Photographic Experts Group -> Joint Photographic Group

No experts to be found here! :P

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I never really understood why people still adhere to the 3 character file extension limit when that is a throwback to FAT32 on pre-Windows 95 (and some very old mainframes which shouldn't be internet connected anyway). Yet some people still favor the 3 character extension despite it looking objectively uglier (as a dyslexic I do find them harder to read) and dropping a solitary vowel in a file extension saves you nothing in terms of development time / file size / etc.

So I honestly don't get why people still use them.

Extensions that particularly annoy me are:

    yml instead of yaml

Why do people do this when even the earliest YAML spec is much newer than the last of the systems that had a 3 character extension limit.

    jpg instead of jpeg

Nearly all of the .jpg's in the last 10 years would be too large to load on any systems that couldn't handle a 4 character extension anyway. So backwards compatibility isn't even an argument here.

    htm instead of html

Similar argument as JPG except this time it's more to do with the HTML specification and browsers capable of rendering them.

> objectively uglier

Not sure why'd you'd say "objectively" when it's clearly not, the hint being the word "ugly."

I can certainly appreciate the limitation of "extensions will always be three characters". In fact, I wasn't exposed to extensions habitually longer than that until I did iOS dev. "Main.storyboard" "Model.xcdatamodeld" So if we're going to talk about ugly, I'd start there. ;)

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so yes, in other words completely subjective.

Sorry, as another poster commented, I did mean "subjectively" (doh!)

xcdatamodeld is definitely ugly (though main.storyboard is ok in my personal opinion) and I'm sure there will be other examples where file extensions have been taken too far. I think if one wants to use long extensions then the extension needs to at least be readable at a glance (eg xcdatamodeld is ugly to read - even if you switched it the other way around, xcdatamodeld.model would still be unpleasant). So I'd argue that xcdatamodeld is more of an example of a poor naming convention than a problem with longer extensions (I say this with no experience of iOS development, however I see the same problem quite as acutely in the other languages and platforms I've developed on).

It should also be noted that my argument was really more focused on people who shorten already short 4 character acronyms - just for the purpose of making it 3 letters (eg the yaml and html examples I gave).

> 3 character file extension limit when that is a throwback to FAT32 on pre-Windows 95

The 3 character file extension is much older than FAT32. It was part of the original FAT that was created nearly 20 years earlier, and later part of FAT12 and FAT16. But it predated all that in various other microcomputer DOS, as well as minicomputer systems going back into the 60s.

Yes, definitely! What I meant by my statement was no system has been dependant on a separate extension meta-property since FAT32 (pre-vfat). But yes, you're absolutely right that the 3 character extension standard is much older than FAT32.

I didn't think it was quite as old as the 60s though? CP/M and FAT are mid-to-late 70s. VMS was around the same time too, or maybe slightly earlier. What else stored the extension as a separate meta-property to the file name?

The extension is somewhat of a misnomer. It's really a jif. JPEG Interchange Format. You can imagine the confusion if the jif extension caught on.

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