Buzzword of the year

I don't know if it is due to the onmarch of New Atheism, but suddenly “agnostic” is the word to use, though with regards to technology rather than the supernatural. What last year would have been “format-independent” is now presented as “format-agnostic”. I don't see that we thereby have gained in clarity.

To further confuse the issue, in many cases even “format-independent” would be a bit of marketing lies, as what in most cases is intended is “supports several different formats” where the magnitude of “several” is subject to the subjective opinion of the writer. A system could of course be format-independent in the sense that it is easily extended with user-supplied code to handle any new formats, very neat from a programming perspective, but usually not what someone buying a computer system expects.