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Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by layer8 on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @10:05PM (#33618317)
> HTML, XML, and ZIP files aren't going anywhere

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those go out of use in a few hundred years, if not much earlier. There will probably be major conversion efforts going on at some point. The alternative, the above formats being maintained for eternity, would be somehow depressing.

Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by armchairhacker on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @10:33PM (#33618489)
I looked up those formats and they are all around 30 years old, which is insane for technology and around when Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7 were released. So maybe they will stay...

They are all-but deprecated though: HTML 1.0 is much different from HTML5 (2014); XML is upgraded to XML 1.1 (2004) and most people use JSON nowadays; and ZIP is very inferior to gzip and 7-zip. We're lucky web browsers are strict with never remove compatibility for old sites, and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason.

Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by Vrondi on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @11:21PM (#33618805)
Yes, but HTML 1.0 renders perfectly in any web browser in existence. That's the amazing part. Browsers are designed to fall back to render older versions of standards.
Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by robin_reala on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @02:32AM (#33620042)
HTML1 [1] isn’t that different, it’s just a much smaller subset.

[1] https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt

Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by kevin_thibedeau on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @03:00AM (#33620260)
Gzip is not a container format. Pkzip is far more flexible.
Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by oblio on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @04:37AM (#33620732)
You will also happy to read about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Once something is mainstream and non-perishable, odds of it going away go down and it's foreseeable that it will be around for at least as long as it's already been around.

This effect is super strong in tech, for base technologies, with lots of integrations, especially around enterprise/governmental systems (which don't get changed unless someone makes a strong business case why the change makes more money) and consumer hardware (which tends to linger for aeons since it's so distributed).

Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by deafpolygon on Saturday November 19, 2022 @01:14PM (#33672909)
Back to vim or emacs then!
Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by yyyk on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @03:22PM (#33629972)
>and ZIP is still used by macOS instead of .tar.gz for some reason.

Also, several other tiny insignificant Operating Systems like Android(/Linux) [apk files] and Windows [builtin explorer support]. Let's also not forget Java JAR files.

Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by Shorel on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @02:26AM (#33620002)
It would be a bit tragic if HTML goes out of use, but JavaScript continues XD
Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by account42 on Thursday November 17, 2022 @05:44AM (#33637189)
There are already websites that intentionally hide everything until JS loads even though all the content is still in the HTML. Not to mention sites where the HTML is just a stub to load JS.
Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by tannhaeuser on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @04:55AM (#33620827)
The thing with first-mover formats (SGML and derivatives such as XML and HTML) is that they tend to stay around a long time. Where should an all-new doc format come from in this day and age anyway? The ecosystem of multiple parties adopting a format that led to XML and related standards has largely been abandoned by FAANG.

However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.

Re:Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books by account42 on Thursday November 17, 2022 @05:42AM (#33637175)
> However, the threat of fubaring web media doesn't come from markup (HTML, XML, SGML) but from the complexity of CSS having gone rogue, and JS.

Or DRM. HTML still being used isn't going to help you when its wrapped up in an encrypted blob. We're not there yet (except for video) but you can bet there are plenty of actors who will jump at the chance.