--------
John Atchley wrote:
<quote>
[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.
<p>
<devil's advocate>
Provided it's on an accessible physical medium. 30 years ago
...
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.
<p>
Finally, nothing stored on magnetic media is likely to be reliably readable
a century from now even if you can find compatible hardware.
...
</devil's advocate>
</quote>
<p> Yup. This is a growing lament from historians. Much of the
world's history is now in forms that will shortly be difficult or
impossible to read. That which is readable will require very
expensive equipment. I have a collection of backup tapes from various
projects that I've worked on over a couple of decades; none of them
is readable on any equipment that I have available.
<p> In fact, what seems to be happening is that most of the world's
usable information is going permanently online. Attempts to estimate
the size of the online disk drives are concluding that there are more
bits online now than the information content of all the world's
physical libraries and archives. The most reliable way to back up
data is to copy it to another machine's disk. That way you have a
good chance of being able to read the bits, and your remaining
problem is whether you can decode the file format.
<p> I have a sizeable collection of ABC tumes online. They are backed
up on three other machines. (Can you find them? ;-) If I get squished
by a truck on the way home tonight, any one of you could download any
or all of my tunes and they wouldn't be lost. This is, on the
average, a lot more reliable than any tape or paper copy in my home,
where one fire would destroy them for all eternity. One thing that is
obvious from my work on indexing the online ABC is that most of the
ABC tunes are backed up at one or more other sites.
<quote>
I've been doing the family-history thing and what I finally settled on as
the most probable format for longevity is HTML.
</quote>
<p> This is likely true. To illustrate it, I've taken the step of
typing this message in HTML. I'd predict that if this message is
still around in a century, it'll still be readable by anyone, no
matter what computers have evolved into by then. And I'd also guess
that few if any of the readers here are put off by the simple markup
that I've used.
<p> One growing problem with HTML, though, is the large body of "junk
HTML" being spewed out by a lot of software. HTML was designed to be
simple and unobtrusive, with the idea that people could type and read
it. Now we see lots of mailing lists installing filters that discard
all HTML, because so much of it is unreadable garbage. As we move to
the more capable XML, this will probably get worse. This will be true
despite the fact that markup like the above <devil's advocate> tag
are simple and obvious (though syntactically incorrect ;-).
<p> Still, if you type it yourself, HTML markup is probably a very
good way to get simple formatting without making the text unreadable.
The main problem here is that it's tricky to embed ABC inside an HTML
document without garbling the musical information.
<p> (I note that this list does still pass HTML. This message would
not be readable on a lot of other mailing lists, though, since their
filters would discard the whole thing. ;-)
<hr>
Reply-to: <a href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:>John Chambers</a>
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