[SCC_Active_Members] Digital Data Format problems

[Gio Wiederhold]

Randall,
  I agree with the undesirability of proprietary formats.  Even now I cannot
ship Powerpoint and Excel files in Office Vista format to my computers that
are only running Windows 2000 or XP, and have them understood.
  The claim is that the Office formats, being based on XML, are more
standards compliant, but understanding the specific data is anothewr issue.
I don'y now of these .pptx and xlsx formats contain any useful metadata.

Gio

PS At one point the British Archives were promoting their adoption of MS
Word 3.01 to the equivalent EU organization. The EU did not bite.
Gio

On 7/5/07, Randall Neff <randall.neff at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At the last meeting, Henry was demonstrating saving PowerPoint files
> into his demo content managment system.  I was concerned about
> saving files in secret, proprietorial formats.  Also, the metadata did
> not record WHICH version PowerPoint format.
>
> The British National Archives has the same sort of problems, and
> Microsoft is going to save the day through virtualization technology.
> Of course, you need a copy of every Microsoft OS and application
> version to make it work.
> The article doesn't mention different floppy disk sizes, and
> ignores other operating systems and non Microsoft applications.
>
> Warning of data ticking time bomb
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm
>
>
> My suggestion for SPG content is we store it in multiple forms,
> while we have access to the proprietary software application.
> So we save the original proprietary binary format, a image sequence format
> such as .png, and a text format like .txt or .rtf (for searching).
>
> Another problem for future display is that
> some document formats assume specific fonts and font metrics are available
> in
> the computer excuting the application.
>
> Randall.
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-- 
Gio Wiederhold
infolab.stanford.edu/people/gio.html
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