Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin8or
It's important, for the future, that our files be saved in common, open standards that remain easily readable 100-150 years after creation. Our descendants will surely lament that so much was lost due to proprietary standards and rapidly changing hardware.
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Correct. And any project thinking about a transition from printed works to electronic data should consider that. The sad fact is that there is barely any standard in todays' industry when it comes to files and hardware.
PDF is a quasi-standard for documents, but who knows for how long?
MP3 is a quasi-standard for musicfiles and has been for quite some time now (I still have MP3s from the 90s) and one can assume that it'll remain quasi-standard for a while.
However, texts...the txt-file is the best "standard" I can think of. DOC is obsolete and currently being replaced by DOCX, there's ODF on the other side of the spectrum and many more still.
And think about ebooks...there's MOBI, ePUB, ePUB with DRM, Kindle, KF8 is coming...there just IS no such standard and there's nothing that indicates that a real standard is in production.
I mean, if the EU hadn't forced all cellphone producers to create a standard charging cable for all cellphones, we wouldn't have one there (in a few years). And that's just a charging cable - it just gets juice into your cell and has nothing to do with functionality. File formats have everything to do with functionality. Without force, we won't have a standard there, because the heterogeneous world seems to work for the manufacturers right now...