"If HEIC has no haters I'm dead."

“If HEIC has no haters I’m dead.” – Unsung

Over on Bluesky, Melanie Walsh asks:

Favorite and least favorite file formats? I’ll start.

Favorite: TXT

Least favorite: HEIC

The answers – both replies and quote posts – are really interesting because most of the time they’re not about inherent capabilities of each format, but:

how well supported it is in the general ecosystem?

how painful it was last time I used it?

who’s using it and for what?

if there is one app I use it with, do I like this app? (interesting in the context of PDFs which some people love, and others hate)

Of course, Walsh put a finger on the scale with her initial example, but HEIC stands out as a favorite least favorite. I understand this is mostly out of its limited support, raising a question whether Apple spent the right amount of time socializing and incentivizing its adoption – even on a Mac, you can’t escape blank stares the moment you drag it into many websites/web apps:

HEIC on the other hand, Apple’s way of making photos smaller and everything else more complicated than it needs to be.

By the way HEIC is when you drag a picture from your Notes app into your email, and then it laughs in your face and is like sorry, girl, I’m HEIC!! I don’t do things like that!!

I didn’t know I had a least favorite file format but yeah HEIC can fuck right off

Sweet fucking hell fuck heic into the sun

Reading the replies here makes me feel like I live in an oddly privileged bubble in an inverse of the usual meaning of privilege for being a poor Android-using mfer who has never seen a HEIC in their life and had to actually look that sh*t up.

Least favorite is a toss up between HEIC (WHICH NOBODY ASKED FOR, APPLE) and WEBP

Controversial but I hope everyone involved with HEIC only tastes soap instead of cilantro forever

I agree with this person that WebP is much better supported than it used to, but it sometimes takes one link in the chain – cough Google Docs cough – for you to avoid a format forever. And, those are always lagging indicators. If a format didn’t work once in an important flow, it might take many years before you come back:

all the people saying “webp” in the quotes might as well be fighting WW2 still. look for another grievance. please

Some other fun answers:

IF IT’S CALLED [C]OMMA [S]EPARATED [V]ALUES WHY DO I HAVE TO OPEN A WINDOW AND CHANGE THE DEFAULT DELIMITER OPTION FROM TAB TO COMMA ??!?!?!

Favorite: MP3 (invented piracy, patents all expired, doesn’t need an FPU)

Least favorite: DICOM (nightmarish metadata, too many possible image encodings, when it wants a 3D volume the solution is just “a bunch of files in a folder”, also IT IS A NETWORK PROTOCOL >:( )

Least fave: .R01, .R02, etc... – nothing needs to be split into multiple rar files! Please stop! The world has moved beyond this.

Least favorite: can I count those awful pointer doc types Google uses, like .gdoc and .gsheet

favorite: transparent PNG

least favorite: transparent PNG that is not really transparent but just a fuckin checkered background

I forgot about this meme:

= 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="_media/if-heic-has-no-haters-im-dead/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"><br>= 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="_media/if-heic-has-no-haters-im-dead/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif">

For least fav I voted for GIF, having not only spent countless hours trying to make good-looking animated gifs that do not weigh tens of megabytes, look horrible, and cause performance issues… but also having worked on two different products (Medium and Figma) that had to swallow gifs made by others, and seeing engineers lose their minds peeking into their insides and how messy they were.

To be fair, GIF comes from the late 1980s, and simply outlived its purpose. It’s a fascinating format that literally deserves a book written about it: the messy patent wars, the pronunciation, the technical format and many surprises hiding inside, even the word “gifs” transcending the format itself to mean “short animated memes.”

To go back to the thread, a small pattern that I also encountered from time to time:

Least favorite: .md, specifically when it’s used for Sega Genesis game roms. There’s already a type of text file type called .md, so Windows tries to open them in notepad. Just call it .gen instead, nerd.

"If HEIC has no haters I'm dead."

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