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0 pointsTouche12y ago0 comments

> 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?

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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.

richardwhiuk12y ago

Really? Looking at the source of that page:

IMG tags with unquoted SRC attributes, and unquoted ALIGN attribute

BASE tag with default attribute - tag is: <base="http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/"> but should be <base href="http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">

UL tags with no LI tags

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.

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