Saw this article and thought it was relevant to some of the conversations floating around about ensuring access to electronic material in the mid-long term. Hope the link works:
Saw this article and thought it was relevant to some of the conversations floating around about ensuring access to electronic material in the mid-long term. Hope the link works:
Hold on. someone who is the “anchor columnist for Yahoo Tech” didn’t know about the major version shift from word 97 to word 2000? I mean, that was huge. And the change means that all word files from 2000 on can be opened on anything anywhere, as its pretty much a standard open document format. Here’s a test, rename a docx file with a .zip ending, and open it up and see what’s in it. Pretty much entirely plain text.
I’m not saying format rot isn’t a problem, but vendors have been doing a good job of using things like xml and text based file formats in the last decade, so its not going to be nearly so much of an issue.