[duxuser] Re: the new uses of the slash
- From: David.Pawson@xxxxxxxxxxx
- To: duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 13:15:09 +0100
George wrote about backward compatibility; and Steve about
moving on. But it does seem to me that Braille producers
who archive files have an interest in divining the future,
as regards the uses of those archives over time.
Would there be best practice principles any of you are
prepared to recommend? For example, George, do you
actually believe that we will, in due course, be archiving
XML only? And what then about the older Braille files?
Are the people at Duxbury Systems thinking about these
things, or am I the only one who needlessly worries about archiving?
Legacy data is a problem.
I can see the issues as Duxbury rolls over to new versions, there
may come a time when you need to dig out your old copy of duxbury
to re-emboss the file you saved.
One thing that might help, is to store, with the file, some information
about the file, the version of duxbury it was created on, as well as
the document information, e.g. title, copyright, originator, date of
transcription. With this level of metadata, it will be easier to
recall older documents for reproduction.
Dave D mentioned storing Word files. I would be reluctant to advise that,
since word is guaranteed to change over time; and anyway, who wants their
information locked up in a proprietary format without good reason?
That's the advantage of archiving in a format which should have a longer
life-span and is application neutral, such as XML.
regards DaveP.
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