Why do .jpg and .jpeg both exist?

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Why do .jpg and .jpeg both exist?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Older versions of windows, specifically DOS, were limited to having only 3-character file extensions. So to make things backwards compatible, .jpeg had to be shortened to .jpg. there is no actual difference beyond that, both file types are functionally the same. This is also why most file extensions are only 3 characters to begin with.

There are other file types this was done for as well, such as .htm instead of .html. But that’s not always the case. For example:

When microsoft office 2007 came out, they changed the format for office files from a proprietary binary format, to an xml based format. To distinguish these files from legacy office files, an ‘x’ was added to the file extension. So .doc became .docx, .xls became .xlsx, .ppt became .pptx, and so on. They also did this when asp.net (.aspx) was introduced to distinguish it from classic asp (.asp).

Since office 2007 and asp.net weren’t compatible with those older versions of windows anyways, there was no need to adhere to the 3 character rule.

Edit: small mistake, technically speaking, asp.net should theoretically be able to work on those older systems, since the asp.net part is actually run on a server and simply serves the resulting html content back to the user.

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