🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2 Oct 1998 11:22:44 +1000, nick@zeta.org.au (Nick Andrew) wrote:

>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.
>
>It occurred to me on discussing this issue that perhaps the save format
>(what is written to disk) may be closely related to the data structures
>used in the program.
>
>It may be that when the user "saves" a document that the in-memory data
>structures are dumped to disk with little or no formatting, which results
>in the oft-reported junk and deleted text in the output file.
>
>When Micro$oft releases a new version, the data structure fields or their
>relationship in memory are probably different, and so different versions
>of the program are unable to load each others' native file formats. There
>may be compatibility hooks to allow newer versions to read the files of
>older versions, but it doesn't work in the other direction.
>
>This all goes to show that it's important for commercial, proprietary
>software to be open in terms of file formats and interfaces. It becomes
>more important as the world increasingly relies on these programs - after
>a point it's just not acceptable to _allow_ a company to control internals!


It's impossible to keep file formats secret.  What are you talking
about?


>
>Nick.
>-- 
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