File formats and technologies that should avoided at all costs

Here is a list of file formats and technologies that should be avoided at all costs. Personally, I think these are the worst scum of the modern Internet, next to UCE (i.e. spam). Again, these are only my personal views, and no not neccessary reflect the views of my employers', etc.

• Streaming of non-live Internet video
  • Background
    • I wonder who thought that streaming non-live video on the Internet was a great idea. Thanks a lot for adding a ton of load on the Internet's servers. I admit that this is parctical, for example, for digital TV transmissions, but you people out there who are not using streams like this; get a grip and change to some other more sensible method for distributing video. Streaming Internet video is not "cool" even if you think it is. Of course, this is a whole different situation if the video is broadcasted live.
      
      
  • Why is this bad?
    • Excessive bandwidth usage. This may be the future, but it's not today.
    • Streaming on todays Internet is everything but reliable, there's nothing more annoying than being cut off in the middle of an interesting clip, or trying to view decent quality streaming video with anything less than broadband.
      
      
  • Suggested replacements
    • What's wrong with regular downloads, such as Xvid or other MPEG formats?
      
      
  
  
  
• Quicktime (.mov, .qt)
  • Background
    • Quicktime is originally one of the Macintosh formats that has later on been patched for support for Windows. This does, however, offer quite nice cross-platform support.
      
      
  • Why is this bad?
    • No (official) Linux/Unix support.
    • Really hard to convert to another format, due to the fact that the specifications for this format have not been publically released.
    • You are (basically) tied to Apple's solutions for players, encoders, etc. Hacks exists for, for example, Linux, but these are only hacks.
    • Using this technology it's possible to create videos that MUST be streamed. Not all of us are on broadband, you know!
    • Watch the player's nag-screens if you are using the free Windows version.
    • Encoder is not free.
      
      
  • Suggested replacements
    • Xvid, MPEG4 (not Apple's though)
      
      
  
  
  
• Realmedia (.rm, .ram)
  • Background
    • This was once a relatively popular format amonst Windows users due to it's (at that time) good compression/quality ratio, but has now (luckily) lost a great deal of it's popularity.
      
      
  • Why is this bad?
    • Really hard to convert to another format, due to the fact that the specifications for this format have not been publically released.
    • You are (basically) tied to Real Media's solutions for players, encoders, etc. Hacks exists for, for example, Linux, but these are only hacks.
    • Some of Real Media's software has been confirmed as spyware.
    • Using this technology it's possible to create videos that MUST be streamed. Not all of us are on broadband, you know!
    • Watch the player's numerous ads.
    • Encoder is not free.
      
      
  • Suggested replacements
    • Xvid, MPEG4 (not Apple's though)
      
      
  
  
  
• Microsoft Office formats (.doc, .xls, etc.)
  • Background
    • Nice formats for Windows...
      
      
  • Why is this bad?
    • ...but no or very limited support on other platforms.
    • There a quite a few worms exploiting vulnerabilities in these formats (well okay, the programs that use these formats actually).
      
      
  • Suggested replacements
    • Plaintext (.txt)
      
      
  
  
  
• GIF and JPEG Images (.gif, .jpg, .jpe, .jpeg)
  • Background
    • GIF is well adapted for online communications because of its streamability and progressive display capability. GIF has somewhat died out nowadays, however. JPEG is basically still a pretty good format with relatively good compression/quality ratio, but has unfortunately stumbled upon some legal issues.
      
      
  • Why is this bad?
    • GIF is no longer free to use (royalties), JPEG will also probably become non-free at some point.
    • JPEG is a lossy compression.
      
      
  • Suggested replacements
    • Lossless PNG (which, basically, combines the best features of the JPEG and GIF formats)
      
      
  
  
  
• (X)HTML E-Mail Messages
  • Background
    • Now this is another "great" idea. Let's put HTML inside e-mails so that we can basically send webpages to oneanother! While this could have good uses, most people misuse this, not least in the form of UCE (i.e. spam).
      
      
  • Why is this bad?
    • Why would you want to do this anyway? Isn't this what webpages are all about?
    • Worms and other exploits can spread like wildfire inside messages with embedded JavaScript, etc.
    • Not all e-mail clients understand/parse HTML.
    • Excessive bandwidth usage and server load (though marginal).
      
      
  • Suggested replacements
    • Plaintext!
      
      
  
  
  
• Direct Connect Peer-to-Peer Network
  • Background
    • This started out as a horribly buggy file sharing client written in Visual Basic and based on IRC. First of all, Visual Basic isn't even a "real" programming language, and is not suitable for projects as large as this. How this got to be so popular is beyond my understanding. Clearly, the Direct Connect community has no idea what's best for it, as I've seen endlessly long flame wars about "what's best for the community".
      
      
  • Why is this bad?
    • I have never seen a more mismanaged file sharing network, and all kind of mismanagement usually equals to unneccessary traffic and load on the Internet.
    • Compatibility between the different clients doesn't even exist.
      
      
  • Suggested replacements
    • BitTorrent, you w4r3z m0nkey! ;-)