“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

Re:“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” by Touche on Monday March 17, 2014 @03:47PM (#7417587)

> Software is hard. I think it's pragmatic for software vendors to have a strong, transparent philosophy about the trade-offs so that consumers can make the right choice.

I'm not talking about software, I'm talking about information. Information shouldn't have an expiration date. Here's a webpage from 1994: http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/ Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” by Timmmmbob on Monday March 17, 2014 @04:20PM (#7417809)

Yeah but "information" generally requires software to view it. The only reason that web page still works in modern browsers is because they've gone to all the effort to account for quirks in ancient HTML. Apple clearly didn't think it was worth the effort in this case.

Also worth pointing out it's much easier to display old formats than it is to make them editable.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” by upofadown on Monday March 17, 2014 @06:35PM (#7418573)

I don't think ancient HTML was complicated enough to have quirks.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” by richardwhiuk on Tuesday March 18, 2014 @09:51AM (#7421860)

Really? Looking at the source of that page:

IMG tags with unquoted SRC attributes, and unquoted ALIGN attribute

BASE tag with default attribute - tag is: <base="http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/"> but should be <base href="http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/">

UL tags with no LI tags

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” by pgeorgi on Monday March 17, 2014 @04:00PM (#7417676)

That was one of the main reasons IE6 survived for so long.

So yes, under some circumstances, old formats are deprecated - even on the web. The world is better for it, but it still sucks for those who need that old stuff and are unable to move it forward.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” by mseebach on Monday March 17, 2014 @04:32PM (#7417897)

> Here's a webpage from 1994

It's a good thing that webpage didn't use the <blink> element.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” by nemothekid on Monday March 17, 2014 @05:11PM (#7418116)

>Surely you wouldn't prefer a world where the blog you wrote 4 years ago can't be viewed on a new computer?

A counter argument to that, is I'm not sure if I want to live in a world where parsing an HTML document takes over 1,000,000 lines of unparallelizable C. You are sweeping a huge requirement that makes the rendering of that page possible in 2014. Ultimately it takes software to render that information, and the software that does render that, may have an expiration date.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old” by sliverstorm on Monday March 17, 2014 @10:06PM (#7419551)

Surely you wouldn't prefer...

How about if we're talking a blog I wrote 20 years ago, vs. some really nice improvement in modern software?

Backwards compatibility is great, and ideally no data would ever be lost to bitrot, but backwards compatibility always has a cost. I'm not unilaterally willing to pay that cost.

[ Parent | on HN ]