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 exis

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