File Formats Blog

There's a 1986 book in my personal library called File Formats for Popular PC Software: A Programmer's Reference, by Jeff Walden. The chapter titles list the formats covered:

• Lotus 1-2-3
• Ability
• dBase II and dBase III
• Data Interchange Format (DIF)
• Multimate Professional Word Processor
• Microsoft Multiplan and the SYLK File Format
• IBM Plans+
• SuperCalc 3 and Super Data Interchange Format
• VisiCalc
• WordStar
• WordStar 2000

These were leading formats of there time, and none of them are in active use today. Fortunately, there are still converters available for most or all of them; but the list serves as a reminder that in twenty years all your documents can become obsolete.

I'm not throwing the book away. You never know when someone will produce a cache of old files that need to be recovered, and the existing converters may or may not be bug-free and adequate.

# posted by Gary McGath @ 6:56 AM 0 comments

Cue Gustav Holst's music -- specifically, "Saturn, the bringer of obsolescence."

CNET has an article on the Planets Consortium, dedicated to preserving data and avoiding its loss due to format obsolescence. The Planets Project website has entries dating back to June, but this is the first I've heard of it. Participants include a number of prominent European archives and libraries.

The site mentions a recent workshop on preservation of digital photographs (page in Danish).

"Planets" is, with the aid of a Moebius shoehorn, an acronym for "preservation and long-term access project through networked services."

# posted by Gary McGath @ 11:57 AM 0 comments

Just when you thought you'd figured out Java 5...

# posted by Gary McGath @ 3:09 PM 3 comments

Microsoft's OpenXML document formats are moving toward approval by Ecma International with surprising speed, according to this CNET article. The next step would be ISO certification, which will take the better part of a year. Alliances and rivalries form and harden over OpenXML vs. OpenDocument, as described in a very interesting article. Whether there's a clear winner or not, we all win from Microsoft's move from undocumented Word and Excel formats to schematized XML.

Labels: XML

# posted by Gary McGath @ 9:27 AM 0 comments

Grayscale. That's a nice black-and-white concept, isn't it? Maybe the truth is shades of gray; see the discussion on the TIFF list.

Tags: tiff

Labels: TIFF

# posted by Gary McGath @ 8:57 AM 0 comments

W3C has announced XSL 1.1 as a W3C recommendation. This shouldn't be confused with XSLT, which is what most people are really talking about when they say XSL, and which is now at version 2.0.

Labels: XML

# posted by Gary McGath @ 1:19 PM 0 comments