On Thursday, October 26, 2000 10:54 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
> But plain ascii text from 30 years
> ago is readable just about anywhere, and will be readable a century
> from now.
<devil's advocate>
Provided it's on an accessible physical medium. 30 years ago punched paper
or mylar tape and ibm cards were a common storage medium, nine-track tapes
were probably the most common storage, and disk drives of any kind were "on
the cutting edge."
Now, you'd be hard pressed to find hardware to read your paper or mylar
tapes and ibm cards outside of a museum and even equipment that can handle
nine-track tapes is becoming rare outside of universities and government
facilities.
Finally, nothing stored on magnetic media is likely to be reliably readable
a century from now even if you can find compatible hardware. Even some
optical media (writeable CDs) suffers from loss over time. The best
archival guarantee I've seen on "platinum" writable CDs is 100 years.
In short, anything that is not in a human-readable, durable format (i.e. at
least acid-free paper properly conserved) can't really be considered
reliable for long-term archives.
</devil's advocate>
All that said, I agree with everything you said ;-)
I've been doing the family-history thing and what I finally settled on as
the most probable format for longevity is HTML. This allows some
formatting and graphics (using PNGs or JPGs). There is also a pretty good
chance that basic HTML (the original HTML tags, no scripting or DHTML
features) will remain backwards compatible for the forseeable future simply
because so many companies have a lot invested in millions of pages of HTML.
It also offers the advantage that any platform that can read whatever
physical media the files are stored on can display them.
John Atchley
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