Plain Text Persists

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment

“Relying on these application files for our precious words is a mistake. Standards and preferences change. What your computer can understand today, it may not tomorrow.”

I’ve got a shelf full of backed-up work that is essentially useless because the applications, file formats, and technologies I used to create the work no longer exists.

What value is an archive if it’s not usable years later?

One thought on “Plain Text Persists”

Jamie Thingelstad says:

February 15, 2011 at 5:01 pm

I think about this a decent amount with photos. GIF, JPG or PNG are probably safe for the long haul, but they are not very good formats for photography. Adobe has long been pushing for DNG to be the answer for this and so far I voted with my files and did move all my files from very proprietary CR2 to DNG.

For words though, text, and if not text HTML seem like the clear archive proof way of keeping things.

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