Re: Affecting Institutional Change (Yeah Right)
On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 11:33:45AM -0400, Amy Templeton wrote:
>
> Oh well. Well, in that case, I stand by my original position: I do
> not want to get used to depending on decoders if I can't have some
> degree of assurance they'll be available later.
>
[For one meaning of decode]
The US government went to IBM for help in providing an approved
encryption algorithm and they came up with ... EBCDIC :)
There is a serious point to be made to your college. Archiving,
readability, public record. I've only been dealing with computers for
about 22 years: I've used what were then leading word processors
- Wordstar 2000, WordPerfect 5.1 and 6.0 and Word for DOS.
Niche publishing with DTP software like early FrameMaker and Ventura
Publisher for GEM.
With the exception of WordPerfect - which seems still to be in vogue
for American lawyers - the others are effectively gone forever. There's
a small, but _extremely_ lucrative market in document conversion: I
suspect that there's an awful lot more that needs converting and people
haven't yet realised. The "digital Dark Ages" scenario is already on us:
documents 20 years old are unreadable. This goes for Microsoft Word
documents as well - except that they contain binary blobs which
makes the task of reconstruction doubly difficult.
ASCII is an international standard and is universal and ubiquitous:
.doc is not - hence "forward" compatibility whereby Word docs are
re-saved into the newer format but not backward compatibility to read
and generate docs into/from Office 2007 format on Office 97.
The OpenOffice.org format is now an ISO standard, just like some
variants of PDF (and possibly Adobe PostScript - though I'm not sure on
this one). It's documented and will be therefore be available pretty
much forever. There's enough detail in there to reconstruct it from scratch
for digital archaeologists if need be.
[Governments need reliable 30/50/100 year document retrieval, for example,
and the oldest regularly consulted legal document source in England dates
from 1086.]
If you need a certified copy of your graduation thesis in 5 years /
college records / assignments - basically anything digital which relates
to your time at college - you and your college had better make sure that
it's available in ASCII/PDF/OpenOffice.
[Remember kids, the Microsoft Office Student and Teacher licence you
have in college expires when you graduate - please uninstall all Microsoft
college licenced products and purchase full versions at $$$ cost or we'll
send BSA/FAST after you :) ]
> On a positive note, I recently did actually get through to someone
> (next year she plans not to use any .docs on her little area on the
> school website)!
I'd have her hide for using .docs anyway - if the documents aren't all
readable text-only (with a screen reader for the blind/visually impaired
or any other appropriate technologies for those with other impairments),
then she ought to consider using only plain HTML _anyway_ . No publicly
available document should mandate the use of a mouse - look at the good
web accessibility sites - and consider carefully the Americans with
Disabilities Act (or other appropriate local legislation).
>
> Amy
>
Andy
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