🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 2 Oct 1998 09:53:05 GMT, "A. van Luijpen"
<Alexander.vanLuijpen@nym.sc.philips.com.nospam> wrote:

>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$oft releases a new version, the data structure fields or their
>> relationship in memory are probably different, and so different versions
>> of the program are unable to load each others' native file formats. There
>> may be compatibility hooks to allow newer versions to read the files of
>> older versions, but it doesn't work in the other direction.
>
>Although no real Macro$oft fan, I cannot believe that this is the reason for the 
>incompatibility issues between versions. For one, I have the idea that - most likely - 
>in Word97 they discovered the idea of compression. For instance, saving an equal 
>document with a bitmap image in both formats will render a much larger file in the 
>95/6.0 version than the 97 version. I have been able to still read these files under 
>95/6.0. The case was that I image-heavy documents which spanned multiple diskettes 
>(yes, I know diskettes are of the past, but still they come in handy sometimes when 
>exchanging stuff with people w/o Jaz :-) I had to make several files, each containing 
>single pages of the document in order to transport them in an easy manner. Apperently 
>the old version converted all images to RAW/BMP type data. Word97 however 
>automatically compresses the file quite a lot. 
>

clearly formats have to change to take new features into account.  

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.