File Formats Blog

In doing a search for blog posts about JHOVE, I came across a very interesting discussion of the conflict between exact format checking and error tolerance. "Postel's law" implies that readers should overlook errors in files whenever feasible. But what should digital repositories do? Should they be completely strict, because we don't know how future readers will work? Or should they overlook some harmless errors rather than reject otherwise perfectly good documents? JHOVE uses a "one strike, you're out" approach, which is often less then ideal. But accepting any document which doesn't break the current Adobe Reader would be reckless. The balance is tricky. Some errors are deadly, some harmless, and validation software should really be able to distinguish degrees of harm.

Labels: JHOVE, PDF, preservation