Here be the Archive Team’s take on file formats. (Nope, not going to copy that. Chances are, WordPress.com will go down before AT does, and that’s a long time in the future.)
I find it pretty ridiculous. Archive Team, of all people, suggesting plain text, and PNG and SVG on the same page? Along with Ogg (presumably Vorbis) and AVI? I call bullshit. Plain text is an understandable choice, because even if a file was sent to an alien civilisation, with reference to real written/printed text, it’s very possible (and not hard) to decipher it using frequency analysis. (Assuming English, of course.) As for pictures, Windows bitmap and PNM look like the best candidates, for obvious reasons; these are again easily reverse engineered. (Well, BMP not so much because of all the random headers, but generally they’re unimportant.)
Now, Gzip (and compression formats in general) is something that cannot be reverse engineered easily. How many compression formats are in common use today? There’s Gzip, Bzip2, Zip, 7z, Xz, RAR and maybe a bunch of slightly more niche formats. There’s no way to define the “best” one to use for everything: Gzip has low encode/decode requirements, but isn’t supported by default on Windows (lol). Bzip2 compresses well, but isn’t supported on Windows either. Xz has even better compression, but again isn’t supported on Windows, not to mention Xz is actually pretty niche and apart from a certain free software distributor (lolgnu) nobody ever seems to use it. Zip is supported almost everywhere, and is kind of the de facto standard, except that this standard magically evolves over time. Support for encryption and non-Deflate compression algorithms (including Wavpack, even) were just added in relatively recently. 7z is… well, some people use it. As for RAR, lolderp.
The only time-proof compression format is to have none at all. This is feasible for text, pictures and audio, but video… that’s hard. One hour of 24 fps 1920×1080 4:2:0 8-bit video already takes up ~75 MB per second, or ~268 GB per hour.
(Last edited on September 9, 2011 at 8:53 pm. DRAFT QUEUE CLEARING. Also this post is at least partially factually inaccurate, iirc, which was the reason I didn’t finish it.)
