Is bmp really dead? It's my go-to file format when playing around with graphic image programming (just stupid hobby stuff). It's easy to pick a format and write one out, and most everything reads it as a format that I've used, even on linux. It can be tricky reading one created by something else, but if you make assumptions based on the header sizes and the fact that you rarely run into one that not a simple 24-bit pixel array, its' not too bad. I do only use it as an interim format, though.
You should take a look at tiff (also on their list for some reason). I used bmp in my imaging work because it's lossless and uncompressed (I got tired of waiting for 500M png files to open). But tiff is quite simple to understand and is a little more future proof than bmp.
I thought about looking into the tiff format, but never have. If it avoids the format versioning trouble that bitmaps have, then I'm all for it. I remember using it back in the day as an output format for the povray ray-tracing program (I think?). Maybe DKB.
It's as dead as you want it to be. IMO, I prefer it when I have to deal with lossless uncompressed images because it's familiar to users of old versions of Windows.
