28 Aug
2011
28 Aug
'11
1:44 p.m.
On 28/08/11 3:53 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 08/28/2011 12:45 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
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?
These are terrible examples and illuminate very little. Why do people
insist on using them?
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. 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.
That's simply not true. Many formats are proprietary. Even extensions
and codecs used with extensible "open" formats are frequently
proprietary (e.g. TIFF).
One *extremely* common format (PSD) is very poorly documented. The vast
majority (> 90%) of what PSD is supposed to represent is not documented
at all. Yet data that cost billions of dollars to create rests in it.
There are countless other examples, many of which will in the future
block access to much public (taxpayer owned) data.
TL;DR: Just because something is ubiquitously used today does NOT mean
the knowledge to decode it is known outside tiny, doomed cabals.
--Toby
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