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Somewhat related... I'm starting to think the fear we had 20 years ago about formats going obsolete is largely overblown. I know for sure that SOME formats will

Somewhat related... I'm starting to think the fear we had 20 years ago about formats going obsolete is largely overblown. I know for sure that SOME formats will become unusable in another few decades, but the major things we all use for this type of stuff will pretty much never die. I bet we'll be able to open a GIF, JPG, PNG, MP4 in 100 years just as easily as we can today. There's just way too many of these things around now. I know libraries and museums are full of oddball things like wire recorders and wax cylinders that are used as examples, but I'm just not sure that's applicable to most (not all) digital files now. I just can't imagine there will ever come a day where we'll say "It's time to convert these 1 billion PNGs we have saved to the latest greatest format or we'll never be able to use them". Hopefully I'll be alive in 30 years to see if I'm wrong :-)

warmwaffles 8y ago
But that's not what this is about. It's about saving the original source for later use. Be it FLIC files, GIFs, or w/e the next format is. Archiving is fairly important.
joepie91_ 8y ago
There are already digital file formats that are difficult to read - often made worse by them having design quirks that are not documented anywhere and only exist in the original implementation, which of course won't run on modern systems. The same can happen for particular (non-standard) variations of documented formats. Digital data formats have the same problem as large and popular websites (eg. social media): they look permanent, simply because they're so popular, even when they never are really permanent. At some point, they're going to fall into disuse, and from then on, documentation will slowly fade away. This is why it's so important to work on permanently documenting these file formats today, while the 'documentation rot' is still fairly limited. It's why things like this exist: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Main_Page http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Main_Page
Can_Not 8y ago
> I'm starting to think the fear we had 20 years ago about formats going obsolete is largely overblown I don't think it's overblown. I think we recognized an upcoming problem and some of us made efforts to mitigate it. We still couldn't save everything, but like extinction, is difficult to prove.

warmwaffles 8y ago

But that's not what this is about. It's about saving the original source for later use. Be it FLIC files, GIFs, or w/e the next format is. Archiving is fairly important.

joepie91_ 8y ago

There are already digital file formats that are difficult to read - often made worse by them having design quirks that are not documented anywhere and only exist in the original implementation, which of course won't run on modern systems. The same can happen for particular (non-standard) variations of documented formats. Digital data formats have the same problem as large and popular websites (eg. social media): they look permanent, simply because they're so popular, even when they never are really permanent. At some point, they're going to fall into disuse, and from then on, documentation will slowly fade away. This is why it's so important to work on permanently documenting these file formats today, while the 'documentation rot' is still fairly limited. It's why things like this exist: http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Main_Page http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Main_Page

Can_Not 8y ago

> I'm starting to think the fear we had 20 years ago about formats going obsolete is largely overblown I don't think it's overblown. I think we recognized an upcoming problem and some of us made efforts to mitigate it. We still couldn't save everything, but like extinction, is difficult to prove.