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0 pointsteej12y ago0 comments

The world isn't so black and white. Document serialization is a rocky landscape that is rife with compromise. You have to balance document open time, document save time, file size, backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, recovery modes, interoperability, size in memory, parsing time, time to save to disk, proprietary embedded file formats, metadata support, and more. And those are just the development considerations. You also have to think about upgrade cycle, time-to-market, third party integrations, and what will help you win marketshare and sell copies.

Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice. As the grandparent points out, Microsoft values backwards compatibility. If you value that too, buy Microsoft.

0 comments

Touche12y ago

> Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice.

I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about information. Information shouldn't have an expiration date. Here's a webpage from 1994: http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?

Timmmmbob12y ago

Yeah but "information" generally requires software to view it. The only reason that web page still works in modern browsers is because they've gone to all the effort to account for quirks in ancient HTML. Apple clearly didn't think it was worth the effort in this case.

Also worth pointing out it's much easier to display old formats than it is to make them editable.

upofadown12y ago

I don't think ancient HTML was complicated enough to have quirks.

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pgeorgi12y ago

That was one of the main reasons IE6 survived for so long.

So yes, under some circumstances, old formats are deprecated - even on the web. The world is better for it, but it still sucks for those who need that old stuff and are unable to move it forward.

mseebach12y ago

> Here's a webpage from 1994

It's a good thing that webpage didn't use the <blink> element.

nemothekid12y ago

>Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?

A counter argument to that, is I'm not sure if I want to live in a world where parsing an HTML document takes over 1,000,000 lines of unparallelizable C. You are sweeping a huge requirement that makes the rendering of that page possible in 2014. Ultimately it takes software to render that information, and the software that does render that, may have an expiration date.

sliverstorm12y ago

Surely you wouldn't prefer...

How about if we're talking a blog I wrote 20 years ago, vs. some really nice improvement in modern software?

Backwards compatibility is great, and ideally no data would ever be lost to bitrot, but backwards compatibility always has a cost. I'm not unilaterally willing to pay that cost.

michaelt12y ago

Assume you work on Keynote, so you have access to all the code and documentation for the 09 format. On average computers are now faster and have more RAM. You don't need to write the format, only read it. Your users will tolerate 15 minute format conversion times and the loss some things like formatting and videos.

Is it really so difficult to just not break a feature that was present in the last version of the software?

TillE12y ago

Yeah, assuming your software is reasonably modular and you haven't completely rewritten everything from scratch in the new version, retaining support for old file formats shouldn't be a very big deal.

At worst (like in the case of iWork 13 which probably is completely new code), you get one programmer to spend a few days writing a converter which reuses most of the old code.

XorNot12y ago

More importantly, provided you don't do it too often, users will tolerate some loss of formarting fidelity from version to version.

jperks12y ago

Yeah, Microsoft is all that not too super cool and buggy but it's right in persevering the path. Not being able to open and work with old documents is frustrating. In a way it's like forgeting grandparents and parents. Not a good thing to do. Apple PR should hear our voices and make a move. They'll lose too much if they don't.

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