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Re: Many File Formats: do they bother you?

On 7/13/2012 9:38 AM, roughana wrote:

On Thursday, July 12, 2012 7:13:39 AM UTC+10, schmidtd wrote:

.sdk, .shk, .bxy and their ilk bother me no end.  The quicker they are
expunged from all repositories, the better, in my opinion (an opinion
not shared by all, I realize).


I am surprised by all the flak that the Shrinkit format is copping in this thread.
Binary II and Shrinkit preserve the Apple II filetypes and auxiliary flags. Things which are important for applications to deal with file content correctly in ProDOS and GS/OS.
If you just zipped an AWP file, the receiver would not be able to deal with it without adjusting the filetype and auxiliary information. Now that's a step I would rather not have to do.

Sure, if everything is on a Disk Image, then this is contained within the image. So I guess the relevance is diminishing today somewhat.
Exactly so. The disk image itself is a wrapper, much like .shk - except there's no extra step involved because a disk image is a useable entity in and of itself. To users of emulators, and those that are accustomed to moving disk images back and forth as a whole, that's exactly how they operate. For those that came up through the nascent GS internet era, it's not.