That which survives: The problem of data longevity

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Standards can limit the immediate future

Any format, proprietory or open, has its limitations, because it has to balance two opposing forces:
1. Need to provide a stable format, and
2. Need to be flexible enough not to limit new storage and presentation forms.

You cannot have both. Building in flexibility or expandability allows for deviation from the standard enough that a document using certain variations will not render properly if those variations do not exist at the reader. A standard is a static point in time that gets updated periodically (read longer period if more interested and conflicting parties). This severely limits the opportunity to take advantage of newer technology or presentation formats.

For example, I find the ODF adoption of the clunky separate apps and formats style of MS Office to be severaly limiting for what could be a much more flexible future format that could allow full calculation table that can reference text (and vice-versa) and have multiple presentation formats. Basically, ODF legitimises MS Office.

Also, while XML is a flexible format, is it really the best format in which to keep the working <ocument. XML-itis gone mad! XML is good for structured data transmission through text pipes but as a raw data format it is bloated and has slow access. There are even databases that work with XML natively. Someone said that compared to object databases, relational databases are like parking you car in your garage by disassembling it first and reassembling it to take it out. Well XML is like cutting up those disassembled parts and re-welding them again. Insanity for the sake of standards.

I believe we need a flexible file format that can reside in side memory and on disk in the same form. That would be fast to load and swap parts in and out of memory. How different programs use it is up to them, but the basic structure could be standardised allowing new substructures without the clunkiness of DDE or OLE.

Serial formats like XML are really only meant for flexibility in exchange of data and impose severe performance limits.

Posted by: Patanjali   Posted on: 07/03/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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