TAR files from 1970s? ROFF from the 1960s is still used to create and maintain Unix man pages for all flavors of Unix. MIDI from 1983 is older than GIF....
Maybe mbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox), the Unix email message data file format? It hasn't changed much in a really long time, but it's also extremely simple.
Also the diff/patch format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff) is almost as old as GIF, but Wikipedia says unified diff support was added in 1990-1991.
GIF89a left some things undefined (larger than 256 color palettes, timing 0 frames, partial frames, etc), so while the text of 89a is fixed, modern GIF decoders handle s superset of GIF files, just like modern CSV files.
Also GIF89a supported embedded text to be drawn, which is not implemented in any modern decoder I am aware of. Web browsers certainly don't support it. So GIF89a is not technically still in use - we're using a more recent, less standardized flavor.
If I recall, there are other things like this related to modern GIF versus old GIF89a gifs - I ran into a lot of this working on hiding information in GIF file encoding choices (not in the images or file, but simply in choices made by the encoder). Then I scanned zillions of online GIFs to see if someone else had done this, and kept finding weird edge cases in GIF89a.
I think there are also many currently used GIF extension blocks that are in use that were not in the GIF89a spec. I'll see if I can find a list and dates they appeared (remember, GIF89a allowed anyone to add extensions to the format, and many companies did). MIDI is one type of extension block that was once embedded in GIFs by some vendors. PCM audio is another block that appears in some GIFs (so would these not count as GIF format being modified later?)
So even GIF89a is not exactly the same :)
MIDI, v1.0, still works and reads just fine. And it's still widely used (likely the most common flavor of MIDI in use).
Current readers read ancient CVS files just fine, so there are modern behaviors, but the original file format is still also in use.
The tar format in use was made a POSIX standard in 1988, older than GIF89a. The extended formats do not have .tar extensions.
TROFF seems to use the exact same file format it did in 1973: https://troff.org/history.html. The extensions you mention are making it have different output formats, ore making a new version to process the same file format but with code under different legal provenance.
Thanks for the detailed reply, I didn't know about the unofficial changes to GIF89a itself. So, yes, in that case, my point is refuted.
But the examples you gave ("an older format still works today") weren't my point. My point was that GIF89a didn't get any updates to its spec since 1989, yet it remained extremely popular as it is. That's different than a format getting occasional updates to its spec and that stays backwards compatible. If that were the case, even BMP/ICO would predate GIF.
There is no CSV standard. The ancient ones are still completely valid. Some groups have tried to define some regularity, but there is no spec. So by all angles, this predates gif by a long shot.
ROFF and TAR are the same. No group owns some standard for them. And akaik ROFF is still the 1970s format.
Yes, that is one of many, many places trying to be the standard. But that is not a universal, used by everyone, used everywhere standard. CSV is simply not standardized, as any data scientist working with CSV files from all over can quickly tell you. Or a simple google search will tell you. For example, Excel, likely the biggest consumer and producer of CSV files, does not implement RFC 4180. So that is the end of that.
From Wikipedia:
"The CSV file format is not fully standardized. Separating fields with commas is the foundation, but commas in the data or embedded line breaks have to be handled specially. Some implementations disallow such content while others surround the field with quotation marks, which yet again creates the need for escaping if quotation marks are present in the data.
The term "CSV" also denotes several closely-related delimiter-separated formats that use other field delimiters such as semicolons.[2] These include tab-separated values and space-separated values. A delimiter guaranteed not to be part of the data greatly simplifies parsing."
From the Library of Congress database on formats: A CSV file is "A simple de facto format, for which no single, official specification exists."
Just because one guy calls his flavor a standard does not make it a widespread standard, any more than one company adding MIDI to GIFs makes that the newest, universal standard.
I get that you must really, really want GIF89a to be the end all of unchanged golden formats. But the lengths you go to to ignore all this other stuff, without putting in equivalent effort to understand them, is not making the case. Simple spend a minute on Google before posting stuff that is simply untrue. It's easy to find all this stuff.
Since you don't seem to care to read about each format, and understand the nuances and that this question is not the black and white case you want, I'm done providing evidence or cases. Good luck.
It remained unchanged for over 30 years, but there are actually two versions of the GIF file format. The second revision, known as 89a, added a few minor refinements like a frame rate for animations and transparency (but only binary, e.g. fully opaque or fully transparent).
PNG could arguably be seen as GIF 2.0, since it addressed the major shortcomings of the format. But since PNG had no animation capability, it could never fully replace GIF which held on for that one niche use.
