[odf-discuss] A story of TIFF

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello,

I'd like to tell a story. It's a sad story. It's a story about a file
format called TIFF.

TIFF was developed in the mid 1980s, as an attempt to get desktop
scanner vendors to agree on a common scanned image file format, rather
than have each company promulgate its own proprietary format. In the
beginning, TIFF was a simple format. It didn't do much, but it did what
it was supposed to do.

But time passed. Scanners became more powerful, and as desktop computer
disk space became more plentiful. And TIFF grew to accommodate grayscale
images, then color images. TIFF grew to accommodate Postcript. Some
vendors wanted vector drawings, so TIFF grew to accommodate that too.
TIFF grew to accommodate multiple images, and even foreign file formats
like JPEG and RLE. TIFF grew outside just images, to include clipping
paths, for cropping, along with frames, layers and pages. It seemed like
everyone wanted their own special tag in the TIFF spec. It was a format
of absolute, 100% perfect fidelity. If you could describe it, TIFF could
do it. Heck, you can even specify your preferred *byte ordering* in
TIFF.

Gone were the days of data loss. TIFF marked a new era of absolute,
loss-less image perfection. Everyone would use TIFF, and fidelity would
be perfect. 100% fidelity. Always.

But as TIFF grew, more and more vendors felt unable to support all of
it. TIFF became unmanageable. Its number of options, staggering. That's
when vendors decided to implement "interoperability subsets". They would
pick and choose which parts of TIFF were relevant to them, and ignore
the others. Some vendors could not implement LZW compression, due to
patent restrictions, so they didn't. Some vendors saw no need to support
Postscript or SVG. Other vendors only wanted Postscript or SVG.

"Interoperability subsets" was TIFF's downfall. The mismatch in TIFF
support through out "TIFF compliant" applications is staggering. And
today, the only TIFF file that you can make and expect to work elsewhere
is an un-compressed raw-data TIFF.

Don't be a TIFF.

Daniel.
-- 
May you live in interesting times.
May people in high places take notice of you.
May all your wishes come true.
  -- Chinese curse.