6 ms·

> Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. While that was certainly true at one time, Unicode text

> Also digital formats are constantly evolving and backwards compatibility for old formats is removed. While that was certainly true at one time, Unicode text, HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either). EPUB books are basically XHTML and XML zipped up along with any external assets (e.g., images). There are nuances, but a DRM-free EPUB book should be readable indefinitely. You can check this out by unzipping the EPUB and looking at the files inside with a web browser (if you're doing it from a GUI, you will probably have to change the file extension to .zip first, so it unzips rather than opens in your ebook reader software).

layer8 4y ago
> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those go out of use in a few hundred years, if not much earlier. There will probably be major conversion efforts going on at some point. The alternative, the above formats being maintained for eternity, would be somehow depressing.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  I looked up those formats and they are all around 30 years old, which is insane for technology and around when Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7 were released. So maybe they will stay... They are all-but deprecated though: HTML 1.0 is much different from HTML5 (2014); XML is upgraded to XML 1.1 (2004) and most people use JSON nowadays; and ZIP is very inferior to gzip and 7-zip. We're lucky web browsers are strict with never remove compatibility for old sites, and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason.
  - Vrondi 4y ago
    Yes, but HTML 1.0 renders perfectly in any web browser in existence. That's the amazing part. Browsers are designed to fall back to render older versions of standards.
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    HTML1 [1] isn’t that different, it’s mostly just a much smaller subset. [1] https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Gzip is not a container format. Pkzip is far more flexible.
  - oblio 4y ago
    You will also happy to read about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect Once something is mainstream and non-perishable, odds of it going away go down and it's foreseeable that it will be around for at least as long as it's already been around. This effect is super strong in tech, for base technologies, with lots of integrations, especially around enterprise/governmental systems (which don't get changed unless someone makes a strong business case why the change makes more money) and consumer hardware (which tends to linger for aeons since it's so distributed).
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      Back to vim or emacs then!
  - yyyk 4y ago
    >and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason. Also, several other tiny insignificant Operating Systems like Android(/Linux) [apk files] and Windows [builtin explorer support]. Let's also not forget Java JAR files.
- Shorel 4y ago
  It would be a bit tragic if HTML goes out of use, but JavaScript continues XD
  - account42 4y ago
    There are already websites that intentionally hide everything until JS loads even though all the content is still in the HTML. Not to mention sites where the HTML is just a stub to load JS.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  The thing with first-mover formats (SGML and derivatives such as XML and HTML) is that they tend to stay around a long time. Where should an all-new doc format come from in this day and age anyway? The ecosystem of multiple parties adopting a format that led to XML and related standards has largely been abandoned by FAANG. However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.
  - account42 4y ago
    > However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS. Or DRM. HTML still being used isn't going to help you when its wrapped up in an encrypted blob. We're not there yet (except for video) but you can bet there are plenty of actors who will jump at the chance.
shakna 4y ago
HTML isn't immune from broken backwards compatibility. The frame element has been completely removed, the hgroup element is gone, and so is the dir element. acronym is deprecated in favour of abbr. isindex, plaintext, xmp, and listing are all dead. The attributes border, clear, background and bgcolor have all been removed by HTML, and shifted to be CSS' responsibility instead. Just moving between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3, you lose the DAISY format support, and external resources. (EPUB2 let you use full URLs to specify parts hosted externally, like webpages, but EPUB3 requires itself to be self-contained. Not a bad change, but still a breaking change.) NCX replaces just using a HTML5 nav element, and a few more things. All of those things mean that there _are_ technical documents that exist, that _aren't_ readable without some effort to update them.
- Vrondi 4y ago
  Yes, but all of those deprecated elements can still be rendered just fine by some of the current browsers. And even if, say, you couldn't display an index page with frameset, then the stuff inside the frames is just plain old html files anyway, which you can display easily. bgcolor, etc. all still render fine in current browsers as well. The main thing is that information which is important to people will get converted to newer formats over time, just as old print books get reprinted if they're popular.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    > The main thing is that information which is important to people will get converted to newer formats over time, just as old print books get reprinted if they're popular. Vs. decent-quality old "dead tree" books, properly stored, can be ignored for centuries and still be perfectly fine. You might want to ask a good historian or librarian about all the incredibly important (historically, to us, now) documents which we know existed, but we do not have, because there was no continuously-operated, high-budget "Holy Brothers of Document Preservation" monastery doing all the re-copy work needed to preserve them. (And maintain off-site backups in case of fire at the Monastery, and ...) (If you aren't familiar - most of the materials used for documents in ancient times degrade fairly quickly. Unless (say) carefully stashed in a nice, dry cave in an arid climate. And even that stuff tends to be "crumble if you touch it" fragile.)
lqet 4y ago
> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either) I very strongly disagree. The amount of technical overhead required to render a simple zipped XML from some storage medium is immense. Even if you store this on tape, you need a tape machine to read the bits. If you manage to pull this off, you won't get anything useful, because the XML is zipped. Deciphering a ZIP and translating it into bits which only make sense if you know that they represent binary numbers and must be read according to an obscure translation table (UTF-8) which is stored also digitally, someplace else, is more difficult than deciphering the enigma code, the hyroglyphs, and the Inca knot language combined. And even if you manage to pull off this unbelievable feat, you still require a parser, a renderer, a display or a printer to even get close to the possibility for a human to read it. For all of that, you not only need electricity, but the devices required are usually easily broken, and manufacturing them requires knowledge and a technical overhead (and also an amount of electricity) orders of magnitude larger than simply using them. Not to mention all the raw materials required to produce a display, a CPU, etc, which may simply be unavailable to future generations. Now imagine humankind after a complete societal collapse. Tribe A finds, in some basement that survived the apocalypse, a collection of basic medical books. Tribe B finds, in another basement, an unlabeled hard disk containing the entire Wikipedia, as a zipped XML file. Which tribe is more likely to survive?
- oblio 4y ago
  I would argue that we shouldn't care about something in the extremely distant future, and what would be the second worst case scenario (the worst one being human extinction). There's no way to really plan for it (prepping is a joke) and it slows down progress if we really do it.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm a bit worried about UTF-8 : it might be impractical to read with 8-bit only CPUs ? http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/ At least the ASCII part should still be easily readable ? But not much of a relief for non-latin alphabet languages...
ivanhoe 4y ago
Literally ANY digital format can be converted to a modern version fully automatically once the need arises. You need to solve the problem once, build a tool, and from that moment on you can convert as many files as you need with a single click. This is way cheaper and easier than dealing with paper rot and ink blended by acids from air and paper.
- account42 4y ago
  This is overly optimistic. Even just for videos you are going to have to accept either additional quality loss or size bloat when converting older obscure codecs to something your average modern device can play.
  - ivanhoe 4y ago
    What you're saying suggests that those old codecs were superior to new ones (offering better quality at smaller sizes), which is not a case for most of formats. Also the "size bloat" with data from say 40 years ago means little today as space has become so much cheaper. If you have to expand your data from say 70kb to 120kb, which 40 years ago would be a huge deal, today it's something no one will even bother to optimize. And anyway, discussion was not about space economy, but about data being permanently lost, unable to be accessed ever again - which unless the medium is physically damaged is very unlikely scenario. There are always people willing to reverse engineer old formats, just look at the state of retro gaming now. I converted my original ZX Spectrum games from tapes to digital files, and can play them on my modern computer almost 50 years later.
zsz 4y ago
The PDF/A format was developed specifically for long term document archival.

layer8 4y ago

> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those go out of use in a few hundred years, if not much earlier. There will probably be major conversion efforts going on at some point. The alternative, the above formats being maintained for eternity, would be somehow depressing.

armchairhacker 4y ago
I looked up those formats and they are all around 30 years old, which is insane for technology and around when Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7 were released. So maybe they will stay... They are all-but deprecated though: HTML 1.0 is much different from HTML5 (2014); XML is upgraded to XML 1.1 (2004) and most people use JSON nowadays; and ZIP is very inferior to gzip and 7-zip. We're lucky web browsers are strict with never remove compatibility for old sites, and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason.
- Vrondi 4y ago
  Yes, but HTML 1.0 renders perfectly in any web browser in existence. That's the amazing part. Browsers are designed to fall back to render older versions of standards.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  HTML1 [1] isn’t that different, it’s mostly just a much smaller subset. [1] https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Gzip is not a container format. Pkzip is far more flexible.
- oblio 4y ago
  You will also happy to read about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect Once something is mainstream and non-perishable, odds of it going away go down and it's foreseeable that it will be around for at least as long as it's already been around. This effect is super strong in tech, for base technologies, with lots of integrations, especially around enterprise/governmental systems (which don't get changed unless someone makes a strong business case why the change makes more money) and consumer hardware (which tends to linger for aeons since it's so distributed).
  - deafpolygon 4y ago
    Back to vim or emacs then!
- yyyk 4y ago
  >and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason. Also, several other tiny insignificant Operating Systems like Android(/Linux) [apk files] and Windows [builtin explorer support]. Let's also not forget Java JAR files.
Shorel 4y ago
It would be a bit tragic if HTML goes out of use, but JavaScript continues XD
- account42 4y ago
  There are already websites that intentionally hide everything until JS loads even though all the content is still in the HTML. Not to mention sites where the HTML is just a stub to load JS.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
The thing with first-mover formats (SGML and derivatives such as XML and HTML) is that they tend to stay around a long time. Where should an all-new doc format come from in this day and age anyway? The ecosystem of multiple parties adopting a format that led to XML and related standards has largely been abandoned by FAANG. However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.
- account42 4y ago
  > However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS. Or DRM. HTML still being used isn't going to help you when its wrapped up in an encrypted blob. We're not there yet (except for video) but you can bet there are plenty of actors who will jump at the chance.

shakna 4y ago

HTML isn't immune from broken backwards compatibility. The frame element has been completely removed, the hgroup element is gone, and so is the dir element. acronym is deprecated in favour of abbr. isindex, plaintext, xmp, and listing are all dead. The attributes border, clear, background and bgcolor have all been removed by HTML, and shifted to be CSS' responsibility instead. Just moving between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3, you lose the DAISY format support, and external resources. (EPUB2 let you use full URLs to specify parts hosted externally, like webpages, but EPUB3 requires itself to be self-contained. Not a bad change, but still a breaking change.) NCX replaces just using a HTML5 nav element, and a few more things. All of those things mean that there _are_ technical documents that exist, that _aren't_ readable without some effort to update them.

Vrondi 4y ago
Yes, but all of those deprecated elements can still be rendered just fine by some of the current browsers. And even if, say, you couldn't display an index page with frameset, then the stuff inside the frames is just plain old html files anyway, which you can display easily. bgcolor, etc. all still render fine in current browsers as well. The main thing is that information which is important to people will get converted to newer formats over time, just as old print books get reprinted if they're popular.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  > The main thing is that information which is important to people will get converted to newer formats over time, just as old print books get reprinted if they're popular. Vs. decent-quality old "dead tree" books, properly stored, can be ignored for centuries and still be perfectly fine. You might want to ask a good historian or librarian about all the incredibly important (historically, to us, now) documents which we know existed, but we do not have, because there was no continuously-operated, high-budget "Holy Brothers of Document Preservation" monastery doing all the re-copy work needed to preserve them. (And maintain off-site backups in case of fire at the Monastery, and ...) (If you aren't familiar - most of the materials used for documents in ancient times degrade fairly quickly. Unless (say) carefully stashed in a nice, dry cave in an arid climate. And even that stuff tends to be "crumble if you touch it" fragile.)

lqet 4y ago

> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere (or there'll be a collapse of society so thorough that print books are unlikely to survive, either) I very strongly disagree. The amount of technical overhead required to render a simple zipped XML from some storage medium is immense. Even if you store this on tape, you need a tape machine to read the bits. If you manage to pull this off, you won't get anything useful, because the XML is zipped. Deciphering a ZIP and translating it into bits which only make sense if you know that they represent binary numbers and must be read according to an obscure translation table (UTF-8) which is stored also digitally, someplace else, is more difficult than deciphering the enigma code, the hyroglyphs, and the Inca knot language combined. And even if you manage to pull off this unbelievable feat, you still require a parser, a renderer, a display or a printer to even get close to the possibility for a human to read it. For all of that, you not only need electricity, but the devices required are usually easily broken, and manufacturing them requires knowledge and a technical overhead (and also an amount of electricity) orders of magnitude larger than simply using them. Not to mention all the raw materials required to produce a display, a CPU, etc, which may simply be unavailable to future generations. Now imagine humankind after a complete societal collapse. Tribe A finds, in some basement that survived the apocalypse, a collection of basic medical books. Tribe B finds, in another basement, an unlabeled hard disk containing the entire Wikipedia, as a zipped XML file. Which tribe is more likely to survive?

oblio 4y ago
I would argue that we shouldn't care about something in the extremely distant future, and what would be the second worst case scenario (the worst one being human extinction). There's no way to really plan for it (prepping is a joke) and it slows down progress if we really do it.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Yeah, I'm a bit worried about UTF-8 : it might be impractical to read with 8-bit only CPUs ? http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/ At least the ASCII part should still be easily readable ? But not much of a relief for non-latin alphabet languages...

ivanhoe 4y ago

Literally ANY digital format can be converted to a modern version fully automatically once the need arises. You need to solve the problem once, build a tool, and from that moment on you can convert as many files as you need with a single click. This is way cheaper and easier than dealing with paper rot and ink blended by acids from air and paper.

account42 4y ago
This is overly optimistic. Even just for videos you are going to have to accept either additional quality loss or size bloat when converting older obscure codecs to something your average modern device can play.
- ivanhoe 4y ago
  What you're saying suggests that those old codecs were superior to new ones (offering better quality at smaller sizes), which is not a case for most of formats. Also the "size bloat" with data from say 40 years ago means little today as space has become so much cheaper. If you have to expand your data from say 70kb to 120kb, which 40 years ago would be a huge deal, today it's something no one will even bother to optimize. And anyway, discussion was not about space economy, but about data being permanently lost, unable to be accessed ever again - which unless the medium is physically damaged is very unlikely scenario. There are always people willing to reverse engineer old formats, just look at the state of retro gaming now. I converted my original ZX Spectrum games from tapes to digital files, and can play them on my modern computer almost 50 years later.

zsz 4y ago

The PDF/A format was developed specifically for long term document archival.