Talk:Dynamic-link library (Windows)

While I agree that making the page "lighter" by removing all that text (which has/had nothing to do with the file format), I strongly object to removing all those links without placing them somewhere else first. They may not have anything to do with the file format itself (that is covered by the EXE article) but some of them privide valuable additional insight into the DLL "sub-format". --Darkstar (talk) 19:40, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

If nobody beats me to it, I'm planning to revert some or all of Felix's changes to this article, the Icon Library article, and maybe the EXE article. I say that DLL is a file format (in fact, it can usually be identified by the file command), so the deletion was based on a false premise. More to the point, it was based on the false premise that every article here has to correspond to a file format. But the real goal, as I see it, is to do whatever it takes to be a useful resource to someone trying to decode a file. Jsummers (talk) 15:41, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you; there's sometimes some tension between the pedantic purist conception of file formats where they're considered to be the same if their technical details are identical, and different when the technical stuff differs, versus a more pragmatic conception where things are categorized more by how they're actually used; in the latter, DLLs are distinct from EXEs because you can run EXEs directly while DLLs are used as support for other programs (and they have different extensions, which is the first thing commonly looked at to see "what type" a file is), but on the other hand various technically-different file types with a EXE extension are in some sense variants on "the same" file type because they look similar in a directory structure and can be run directly in DOS/Windows, even if the variants have little in common technically. This site should aim to be usable by people who think of the files in either way, with enough technical notes to fully explain the details, but easily findable by people starting with a more naive conception. Dan Tobias (talk) 01:03, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

@JSummers: Since Felix has not responded in the last ~2 weeks I would say go ahead and revert all his edits (or at least all deletions he did). --Darkstar (talk) 09:47, 28 September 2016 (UTC)