I stumbled upon the .CBR extension some days ago and it was interesting to read its description, via filext:

Think about it, to create the ultimate comic-book format you simply wrap together some images (GIFs, JPGs, PNGs) and some (optional) introductory text (a .NFO or a .TXT) in a .RAR file and rename it. That’s it. A batch of pictures has been converted into a black-box, into a comic book. We’ve reified a comic out of thin pixels. That’s all CDisplay needs to let you seamlessly experience those images as a comic, but you could get as baroque in your specification of a file format as you like. For, say, a hypothetical .BIO file-extension used to store people’s biographies, you would specify a .RAR wrap of that person photo (that must be named, say, “mypic”, and must be a JPG), one photo as a kid (named “kidpic”), one photo of each parent (“mompic and “dadpic”), a curriculum vitae (“vitae”, must be a .TXT file),... you get the picture. Half of the magic, of course, resides in the reading-program, but that’s the easy part.

Here are two extra, contradictory advantages of creating file-formats thru .RAR wrapping:

What struck me about this file-extension thing was how such a seemingly low-level nitty-gritty construct as a file-extension can be blackboxed mostly thru the high-level path of drag-and-dropping icons to WinRar.

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