Comment by yread

But most of these variations were part of the spec (endianness with II or MM, later magic 43 for bigTIFF 64bit extension). I work with tiff and tiff-derived formats in digital microscopy where its very much not historical. And the alternatives (DICOM supp 145, vendor-specific garbage ... and thats it) are worse.

I quite like the format, the only thing I would change is to have the option not to store directory information in a linked list spread throughout the file but in a simple array. Duplicate it at the beginning and end of the file and you've got resilience too (important in the age of floppies)