Hello, i’m trying to understand what a file format is, what it means, and what the sorrounding context is.
when people talk about a file format, are they really just referring to any type of file?
mp4 is a file format?
mp3 is a file format?
pdf is a file format?
txt is a file format?
doc is a file format?
is that what people are talking about when they say “file formats”? just different types of files that can or should be opened by different programs?
thank you
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Yes, your examples are file formats. All files are just sequences of 1’s and 0’s, but if a file is of a certain format, that means that this sequence follows certain rules and has a particular structure according to the format, and that allows a program to interpret it correctly. If you use a program to open a file of a format that it doesn’t support, or if the file doesn’t adhere to the right format, the program will most likely just fail. For example, a pdf file should start with the version number of the used pdf specification. If that version number in the file is invalid (that is, there is actually no such version) then the program opening the file will immediately have a problem with that.
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