Re: Has anyone looked at digital archiving?

[Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks () VT EDU>]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:14:00 EDT, stanislav shalunov said:

> * The only format that exists today that has a claim on having been
>   around for 40 years is plain text.  Even there, the changes have
>   been no less significant proportionally to the complexity of the
>   format than in other formats; it's just that the format is so
>   trivial (just a sequence of letters, each represented with a
>   fixed-sized block of bits, with special values for space and newline
>   and so forth) that recoding is just as trivial (character set
>   changes, byte size changes, newline and other special character
>   encoding, etc.).

Remember - 40 years ago there wasn't much that talked ASCII.  30 years ago,
so many different storage formats for ASCII existed (6 6-bit, or 4 9-bit, or
5 7-bit in a 36 bit word, 8-bit bytes, and the totally bizarre variable-width
byte of the Dec KL 10/20 processors) that the Internet RFCs referred to 'octets'
rather than 'bytes'.

And woe unto them who have data currently stored in iso8859-* format, without
any tagging of which '*' charset.  iso-2022 encoding is only slightly less
messy..

Transliterating "plain text" is a lot harder than you might think, once you
realize that there exists "plain text" that isn't ANSI-Standard 7-bit ASCII....

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