> Most applications gain nothing from having, say, yet another mediocre bitmap graphics format.
Applications gain a tremendous amount of usability for me by being able to read or write the formats I actually use. Instead we rely on a hodgepodge of scripts and tools to do format conversion manually.
Amiga applications released decades ago can load webp files for example, whether or not the people who wrote them are still releasing updates or are even around. It might not matter to you. It matters to me that files keep being easily accessible.
Today there are plenty of tools I use regularly that can't load or save various formats I regularly use directly. That is pointless, when providing a mechanism to reuse conversion was a solved problem decades ago.
> Actually Gimp does. Gimp's file format handling is all via plug-ins.
But it's not reusing system-wide plugins, which was the point.
> You've almost understood. Instead of adding a layer of abstraction, and then unifying around this unnecessary layer, we instead chose to just use a specific standard format. The problem you're intent on solving vanished.
Unfortunately you failed to understand. We haven't unified on a standard format. We never will, because we get new requirements regularly, and people also create new formats for arbitrary and stupid reasons as well. Format conversion will always be necessary to handle formats produced by different tools.
We can choose to do that "out of band", or we can choose to re-implement it for applications time and time again, or we can move towards a unified system. Today we do the first two. A tremendous amount of time is wasted implementing conversion and loading and saving for different applications, and a tremendous amount of time is wasted on doing out-of-band conversion. I've spent the better part of the last month dealing with crappy data conversion because a tool I need to feed data into implements it's own conversion in a badly broken way instead of reusing a better one, forcing me to go via another format. The amount of developer effort wasted on this bullshit is massive, and the amount of inconvenience for users is too.
> Didn't you ever wonder why Datatypes seemed so brilliant for image files, and kinda sorta OK for music, and then basically of no value at all for most other file formats? It's because there really were sixty different crappy pixmap formats that were completely interchangeable and half a dozen PCM audio formats likewise. But that's not what happened in other domains, because it's pointless.
No, I didn't wonder that, because the limitation there was that Commodore went bankrupt and datatypes was not progressed to cover additional domains, and the Amiga community was not large enough to take on the task of covering more complex structured data options. Meanwhile we still depend on conversion filters for all kinds of other formats all the time for e.g. office suites. So no, it's not pointless.