On 08/28/2011 12:45 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
And those
things are the ones I'm talking about. We will never lose
the spec for the JFIF file format because the whole world uses it. We
will also never lose (assuming we have it now) the PERQ image file
format because there are people like us around.
I don;t beleive any of us are immortal, and nor are the people who get
our collections when we pass away. It's always possible that at some
point in the not-too-distant future one of said nth-generation inheritors
says 'This pinoe of paper is worthless', and then some file format (or
whateer) is lost forever.
Good heavens. Do you really think it takes a bunch of hobbyists
maintaining obscure information to preserve, say, the spec for GIF,
JFIF, and PNG? In the case of file formats that actually get used NOW,
hell, those specs are printed in dozens of books by several different
publishers in many different languages, and sold by the thousands. And
that's not even counting digital archives.
This is a non-problem.
Of course, as people here love to do, it's certainly possible to
point out unbelievably obscure stuff (ahem, Perq) but we were talking
about mainstream image formats.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL