[oclug] When Data Formats Degrade Disgracefully...

[cbbrowne at ntlug.org]

Rod Giffin
> Please forgive me my ignorance, but why in the world would document 
> conversion be an issue at all?

If you're storing legal documents in a proprietary format where the vendor
changes the format every few years, and where future versions won't 
necessarily load in old documents, isn't this something of a problem?

One of these days (probably by 2005), "Word 95" format will be a quaint
data format that new software doesn't support.  (This is _vastly_ true for
the Microsoft formats, which are pretty much dumps of the underlying data
structures used by the program...)

It's probably fair to say that _most_ government documents prepared today
won't be read again 10 years from now, but there certainly are _some_ that
need to be read again.

Ask yourself:  Is it likely that Word 2010 will read Word 2 files, when 
Word 97 had problems with this sort of thing?
-- 
Christopher Browne
cbbrowne at acm.org