Steven Bradley wrote:
I remember this discussion a few years back, when MSO was the defacto standard, and a moving target. One of the most important things for any agency, company government, or individual is backward compatibility. I have many documents that are difficult for me to retrieve, and I wrote them less than 20 years ago, using DOS programs. I can only imagine what things will be like in 30 years for those "old" files. I believe it's of paramount importance, even in this age of rapid development and change, to realize that electronic storage of documents is the wave of the future. They must all be stored in a simple-to-access format that any program can read, not just the latest flavor of the "big boy." I am actually fairly concerned about this, since the concept of proprietary file types has never been addressed by any government agency (it would be easy, for example, for the USGovt to mandate that all files be maintained with the formatting in a separate file. If a large govt (China, the US, EU) mandated that simple change, then all files would cease to be proprietary, except for formatting changes. One might lose the formats, but the file itself would have a permanence that most files do not now have. I might also suggest that the file formatting be subject to some sort of regulation (yes, they CAN do that!), which makes all formatting retrievable, no matter how long it's been since the file was created. Otherwise, we'll all lose a huge amount of information. That's my opinion. YMMV.... Steve Bradley
+10 Girvin Herr <snip> -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
