Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

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> Users already deal with the concept that some files are images, some are audio, some are documents and so forth without apparent problems understanding that.

I'm not sure they do to remotely the extent that they would need to, for file extensions to make sense. I expect that, to the average (say) grandma, there are 3 or 4 kinds of files:

Video, Image, Audio, Other

The first three match human senses. The ear (audio), the eye (images), the combination with motion (video). People have understood those are inherently different things since their childhoods. If your grandam is more advanced, maybe she also understands documents (like PDF), that represent physical papers she has in her hand. In any case, those are all reflections of physical things she already understands, but that's about it. She probably doesn't even understand .exe given that every app she sees would have a shortcut icon.

Now you're proposing that jumping from that to .jpg/.png/.bmp/.tif/.jpeg/.tiff/.webp/.gif/.jp2/.mp3/.aac/.wav/.wma/.mp4/.mpg/.mov/etc. is a huge step? Given how confused I know even I have been about file types in the past and what they mean, I... don't agree.

And sorry, but security is secondary here. Usability comes first.

Your example with matching human senses is excellent (I will reuse it) but I do not understand the link with extensions.

How would showing or not an extension change that? Nobody would expect grandma to make any decisions on the extension.

I suppose it is hard for me to understand because I’ve never been confused about what the file format is, or the association that they have with default applications on a desktop.

I’ve been a position where I had to help advertisers with images for their web shops. Many of the advertiser to that understand aspect ratio, a pixel size, compression or image format at a basic level. I do not think that the concept of a landscape versus portrait image is difficult, nor is the idea that one image is made out of 100,000 squares and another one’s made out of 1 million, or that some have 12 colors like crayons and others have millions like a photo. But many people don’t try to advance their knowledge at all, depending on others to do their computer work for them. This wastes a huge amount of everyone’s time. I don’t really think it’s a good system to teach people that they can operate with the absolute minimum knowledge needed to operate a computer. At times it reminds me of children who haven’t taken the steps to do something like learn to take the lid off a jar and so coming to get you to do it every time even a year after they could’ve been doing it themselves.

I do understand that some people just don’t seem to get this stuff. My parents both have advanced degrees and were using computers when I was born, but they seem to have been struggling with the basics of emails and logins for 20 years now.

The problem here is that we we are discussing systems within windows and windows has a poor system for all of this. I’m not sure what Microsoft can do to improve it since I can’t really think of many positive changes they’ve made in this regard in the past 20 years, other than confirming execution with admin rights.

The main problem that comes up here is security. I agree that file formats don’t particularly matter to the average user, it only matters if a legitimate file opens in the right application when they click on it, and clicking on what appears to be a safe file doesn’t actually trigger an executable. Perhaps windows could prevent files from having a double extension. Perhaps MS could not allow executable files to be changed to different extensions. I don’t know. What I do know is that there’s many instances where hiding the extension has been a security problem, and I don’t know what evidence there is that it helps anyone use the system besides speculation. You can only dumb down a system so much before it loses necessary functionality.

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