🚀 go-pugleaf

On 11 Oct 1998 13:21:18 PDT, M O'Neill <darrow@oneillaw.com> scribed:
>>> In <ys4stod03w.fsf_-_@tulyar.sdd.cegelecproj.co.uk> 
>>>      Dunstan_Vavasour <Dunstan_Vavasour@cegelecproj.co.uk> writes:
>>> 
>>> >What they do is keep changing the internal formats so that old
>>> >versions quickly become unuseable.
>>> 
[heavy snippage, attributions only hopefully accurate at this point]
>>
>
>clearly formats have to change to take new features into account.  

True, but the changes can be made backwards compatible.
>
>file conversion utilities abound.  In my view, different file formats
>is only an annoyance, not a real problem, although I agree that there
>is a certain amount of planned obsolescence here.
>
I can pull up an html4 document with Lynx 1.0.  
The results will not necessarily be what the author intended, 
but as long as the "html4" document does not use any of the
advanced features available my browser will be able to parse
it successfully. This is an example of a format that has been 
changed and extended a great deal in the last few years, yet
a great degree of backward compatability is maintained.

If I save a 1 page plain-text document with *no* special formatting
from MSWord98 will I even be able to load this document into MSWord97?
Let alone MSWord1.0 (did that even exist or did they jump straight to 2.0?).

-- 
Daniel Taylor 
Unix is a Linux-like operating system.