The @w3c recently released version 3 of the #PNG spec more than 2 decades after version 2 was released in 2003. The new spec largely makes official various extensions already in use like animated PNGs, HDR support, and EXIF metadata, so many browsers and graphics apps already largely support it.

Here’s an article by Chris Blume, who is the chair of the W3C PNG Working Group: https://www.programmax.net/articles/png-is-back/

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#W3C #graphics #FileFormats

Shattering the eyeglass: Using Kaitai Structs to dissect the eyeglass’ contents

by @beet_keeper

In my post from 2012: Genesis of a File Format, I created a new file format – the Eyeglass file format. The format provides a mechanism to persist information about a patient’s eye health following a checkup at an opticians. Today in 2023 we can use the format to understand how to make use of Kaitai Structs for understanding file formats.

Given the disclaimer that I am not actually an optician and that the format is purely illustrative, let’s look at the eyeglass again below.

#Code #Coding #digipres #digitalLiteracy #DigitalPreservation #FileFormat #FileFormatAnalysis #FileFormats #kaitai #PRONOM #YYYY

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

by @beet_keeper

In March I was invited by the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group to talk about my experiences using Wikibase with Siegfried, the file format identification tool. I don’t think I’ve talked about that work on here before but you can find links to my iPRES talk on my ORCID page.

Let’s look at the abstract and the content of the talk below.

#digipres #DigitalPreservation #DROID #FileFormatIdentification #FileFormats #OpenData #OpenSource #outreach #siegfried #talks #wikibase #wikidata

Published: Fractal in detail: What information is in a file format identification report?

by @beet_keeper

In early 2022, I was finally able to get around to writing a paper that I had been thinking about for the better part of a decade. The paper, “Fractal in Detail: What Information Is in a File Format Identification Report?” was published via Code4Lib and examines the information that can be extracted from a file format identification report, e.g., reports such as those output from digital preservation tools like Siegfried and DROID.

I provide a brief summary of the paper and its contents below.

#Code4Lib #digipres #DigitalPreservation #DROID #FileFormatIdentification #FileFormats #formatIdentification #Linting #Metadata #PreservationMetadata #PRONOM #PUID #PUIDS #siegfried #StaticAnalysis #TechnicalMetadata

How-To Geek: Snipping Tool Is Getting a Big GIF Upgrade. “GIFs remain one of the most popular image formats on the internet, despite their age. They’re even natively integrated into most messaging apps. Now, Microsoft is testing the ability to create and export them using Windows’s native screenshot and screen recording tool.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/06/21/how-to-geek-snipping-tool-is-getting-a-big-gif-upgrade/

Library of Congress: Preserving a History of Digital Mapmaking: Inside the Geospatial Software and File Formats Documentation Web Archive. “In this interview, Tim St. Onge and Meagan Snow explain how web archiving is preserving documentation essential to understanding the evolution of modern cartography. They outline the motivations behind the Geospatial Software and File Formats […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/06/20/preserving-a-history-of-digital-mapmaking-inside-the-geospatial-software-and-file-formats-documentation-web-archive-library-of-congress/

"…could we use a COG as a shard [inside Zarr]]?!?

It turns out…we can! Check out the linked notebook, where we show exactly this."

https://element84.com/software-engineering/is-zarr-the-new-cog/

#gis #fileformats

University of Michigan: U-M develops free tool to empower municipalities, modernize financial reporting. “When Congress passed the Financial Data and Transparency Act in 2022, it required most municipalities in the U.S. to modernize and digitize their financial reports. This is a heavy lift for small towns and school districts, most of which still report their financial information in PDF […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/05/25/university-of-michigan-u-m-develops-free-tool-to-empower-municipalities-modernize-financial-reporting/

🎉 Another day, another tech blogger unleashing their inner Shakespeare on the thrilling topic of file formats! 🌟 This riveting tale somehow manages to make the nuances of #.gif vs. #.jpeg debate sound like the climax of a daytime soap opera. 🤯✨ How will the world ever survive without this critical analysis? 🙄📂
https://solhsa.com/oldernews2025.html#ON-FILE-FORMATS #techblogger #fileformats #analysis #soapopera #HackerNews #ngated

Hilarious #SMBC on the #plural of #files:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/plural-2

#fun #file #fileformats #PIM

🌟 Understanding image file formats is crucial for quality and compatibility! 📸 From JPEG for everyday photos to PNG for transparency and TIFF for high-quality printing, each format serves a unique purpose. Choose wisely to make your visuals shine! #FileFormats #DigitalArt #Photography

File formats as Emoji: 0xffae

by @beet_keeper

tldr: https://emoji.exponentialdecay.co.uk

File Formats As Emoji (0xFFAE or 0xffae) might be my most random file format hack yet. Indeed, it is a random page generator! But it generates random pages of file formats represented as Emoji.

The idea came in 2016 with radare releasing a new version that supported an emoji hexdump. I wondered whether I could do something fun combining file formats and the radare output to create a web-page.

Along came a spare moment one weekend, some pyscript, and bit of sqlite, et voilà. File Formats as Emoji (0xFFAE) was made a reality.

#0xffae #Code #Coding #digipres #digitalLiteracy #DigitalPreservation #emoji #FileFormat #FileFormatIdentification #FileFormats #learning #PRONOM #pyscript #Python #SkeletonTestCorpus #teaching

@wyatt @kawa Until archive format overhead becomes the limiting factor for size.

At one point in early 2002, I briefly considered using the UNIX tape archive (tar) format to bundle assets in a Game Boy Advance game. Many of these assets were 2048 bytes or smaller. I looked up the spec for a POSIX tar file, and it involved rounding up each file's size to a multiple of the 512-byte block size and adding a 512-byte block header. That kind of overhead adds up. On top of that, searching for a particular file in a tarball takes linear time, not constant or even logarithmic time.

That led me to devise and document a simpler, more fit for purpose archive format called GBFS. Other specialized archive formats may benefit from packing files so as to avoid crossing 16K, 32K, 64K, or 128K block boundaries in the medium.

#FileFormats #gbadev #GameBoyAdvance #FileFormat #archives

File format building blocks: primitives in digital preservation

by @beet_keeper

A primitive in software development can be described as:

a fundamental data type or code that can be used to build more complex software programs or interfaces.

– via https://www.capterra.com/glossary/primitive/ (also Wiki: language primitives)

Like bricks and mortar in the building industry, or oil and acrylic for a painter, a primitive helps a software developer to create increasingly more complex software, from your shell scripts, to entire digital preservation systems.

Primitives also help us to create file formats, as we’ve seen with the Eyeglass example I have presented previously, the file format is at its most fundamental level a representation of a data structure as a binary stream, that can be read out of the data structure onto disk, and likewise from disk to a data structure from code.

For the file format developer we have at our disposal all of the primitives that the software developer has, and like them, we also have “file formats” (as we tend to understand them in digital preservation terms) that serve as our primitives as well. 

#Archives #digipres #DigitalPreservation #DigitalPreservationEssentialism #diplomatics #eyeglass #eygl #FileFormats #InformationRecordsManagement #IRM #JSON #OpenData #OpenSource #RDM #ResearchData #ResearchDataManagement #XML

Huzzah! A small personal 15 year old goal achieved -- finally got a service to update automatically from the PRONOM release notes we first minted at TNA back in 2010 with signature file V31. (Rather than something going wrong and my needing to handle turn. We only trigger a download and update on a new release and it finally worked!)

Today's release V120 reflected live on the ffdev.info PRONOM dashboard and API.

https://ffdev-info.github.io/pronom-page/

#Digipres #PRONOM #DROID #Fido #Siegfried #FileFormats

The latest version of #PRONOM, v120 has been released! Identification for 30 new PUIDs, 32 new signatures and 32 updates. #digipres #fileformats #digitalpreservation https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/aboutapps/pronom/release-notes.xml

The sensitivity index: Corrupting Y2K

by @beet_keeper

In December I asked “What will you bitflip today?” Not long after, Johan’s (@bitsgalore) Digtial Dark Age Crew released its long lost hidden single Y2K — well, I couldn’t resist corrupting it.

Fixity is an interesting property enabled by digital technologies. Checksums allow us to demonstrate mathematically that a file has not been changed. An often cited definition of fixity is:

Fixity, in the preservation sense, means the assurance that a digital file has remained unchanged, i.e. fixed — Bailey (2014)

It’s very much linked to the concept of integrity. A UNESCO definition of which:

The state of being whole, uncorrupted and free of unauthorized and undocumented changes.

Integrity is massively important at this time in history. It gives us the guarantees we need that digital objects we work with aren’t harboring their own sinister secrets in the form of malware and other potentially damaging payloads.

These values are contingent on bit-level preservation, the field of digital preservation largely assumes this; that we will be able to look after our content without losing information. As feasible as this may be these days, what happens if we lose some information? Where does authenticity come into play?

Through corrupting Y2K, I took time to reflect on integrity versus authenticity, as well as create some interesting glitched outputs. I also uncovered what may be the first audio that reveals what the Millennium Bug itself may have sounded like! Keen to hear it? Read on to find out more.

#ac3 #Archives #audio #audiovisual #authenticity #av #Bash #checksums #Code4Lib #corruption #corruptionIndex #digipres #DigitalArchiving #digitalLiteracy #DigitalPreservation #diplomatics #FileFormats #flac #glitch #GlitchArt #glitchaudio #integrity #mp3 #sensitivityIndex #wav

#FileFormats in the wild #Leipzig #GIF

The things that get you excited when you’ve spent too long looking at hex editors… receiving mojibaked invitations for the building’s Whatsapp group! (Although the text is strangely coherent when translated… so it could also be some random crossed wire from the provider)

#FileFormats #Encodings #Mojibake

Who's got two thumbs and her first ever #Pronom submission? This gal! For Logic Pro Project Files (LOGICX/LOGIC) new fdd640. Comments always welcome https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000640.shtml #fileformats #digipres