On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 08:29:13AM +0300, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote: > To expand on it a bit, ODT or ISO/IEC 26300:2006, "OASIS Open Document > Format for Office Applications" is the only international standard for > office documents. It is unlikely that documents not complying with this > standard will be readable in 20 years. > > For simple content it might be possible to use HTML. > > The chances of Microsoft Word2003 documents being readable five years from > now is not good.
I disagree. I think MS Word documents will be readable for a long time because people want them to be. A better argument would be all of those Hebrew word processing programs that were popular in the 1980's that no one has a copy of. Even worse were the ones where everyone still has a backup somewhere, but they used dongles or other copy protection which are no longer functioning. I helped someone who was given the task of taking a 1980's vintage book, writen by one of the "gedolim" of the time and revising it. He had the documents on 5 1/4" floppies. I was able to read them floppies, and burn him a CD-ROM of them. However not only did either of us have the program that created it, we were unable to figure out what it was and read the text. The author of the documents had died almost 20 years ago and his widdow gave away the computer and all of the things that went with it, so there was no trace of what it was. His only choice besides wandering around asking people to open his documents to see if they could was to re-type the entire book. After all, how many people reading this have a computer with a 5 1/4" floppy drive and a parallel port (for dongles?) Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
