Comment by bigger_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigger_cheese | Hacker News Reader

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It's not just HTML. I think any proprietary standard runs the risk.

We've been burned at my work by old word and word perfect documents from early 90's refusing to render properly in new versions of office. I think they tried about three recent versions of office before they gave up and resorted to scanning in hard copies as PDF's to recover some documents.

Access databases are also notorious for this problem. A lot of business apps were written with Access in the mid 90's and it has now become too expensive/time consuming to migrate them off of a dead technology. In business world stuff tends to run far longer than softawre developers consider. Hell COBOL and PL/1 stuff runs in some places still.

That's exactly why I'm partial to Common Lisp. People can badmouth it as much as they want, but I'm still running Maxima on it, AND the application's language still isn't set in stone by design.

(You've also reminded me again that there's market for document-structure-reconstructing OCR.)

Libreoffice does well on old word and word perfect documents.

It does. Emphasis on "well". Not, however, perfect, especially with more complex documents.

That's mostly an issue where you're working on "live" documents, collaborating with others actively. Once you've reached archival stage it's often safe to convert to something more stable. And I put the fault squarely with Microsoft: utter failure to take archival concerns into consideration.

My own preferred fixes are to convert to Markdown or LaTeX, if the structure supports it, and to other formats from there: PDF, HTMK, ePub.

And no, I haven't used MS Word for a decade and a half.

While not as old as your examples, Windows 2003 has just reached EOL, so there are going to be many "crusty" applications that will need to be migrated.

> it has now become too expensive/time consuming to migrate them off of a dead technology.

Is there a particular reason they genuinely have to be migrated? And the fact that Access/Delphi are a "dead technologies" I'd say is further reinforcement of the point of this article.

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