Why the Boring Things Often Matter Most

In the rather esoteric layers of the world of computers, there has been a huge debate over the last year or so about open file formats. OK it's boring but don't switch off yet, because most of the important things in life are truly boring.

This is the deal. Whenever you produce a document, a photo, record a piece of music, or do almost anything on the computer, it has to be stored on your hard drive. Because a computer doesn't physically store sound, photographs or even an image of your letter to Auntie Dot, it has to be encoded in a format that will sit on your hard drive and can be decoded for presentation onto your screen or possibly your printer or mp3 player. That code has to be reproducible from one day to the next and from one computer to another, so that when you email your photos to Auntie Dot, she can see that your kids really are as beautiful as she remembers.

All of this happens pretty well automatically when we save something. Usually we don't have to think too much about what to do, we hit "save' and everything is fine.

The problem is that most of those "codes" or "file formats" are owned by computer corporations such as Microsoft or IBM.

So when you save your letter to Auntie Dot, Microsoft which owns the ".doc" format now controls your letter. If Microsoft goes broke (unlikely, but possible) it's possible that one day you won't be able to open that letter. Not a problem if you are talking about a letter. Big problem if you are talking about a government or business or scientific literature where information has to be stored for ever.

The problems come about when we save a file and assume that we can open it later, but don't need it for a few years. After several software upgrades, the file might be safely on a disk somewhere, but our new software doesn't open the old formats. Suddenly our important data which we need right now can't be accessed. (I've been caught out by this in the past)

As an example of this, Microsoft has recently revealed that new upgrades to Office 2003 will remove support for older Word and Excel documents (click here).

Over the last couple of years, a large group of computer experts from around the world have been developing an open file format for documents called the Open Document Format. This has recently been approved by the International Standards Organisation. The aim of ODF is to make it possible for any software developer to be able to design software to open and save files to an internationally available standard, rather than having to break the codes Microsoft and other develop and keep secret.

Of course Microsoft didn't want to give up its near-monopoly on file formats so firstly it fought the adoption of ODF. then it put up its own format as a "standard"- fair enough except that the experts said that the standard they were proposing was broken, hard to follow and still shrouded in secrecy. In other words they were concerned that in practice Microsoft would still be the only people capable of implementing the format they were proposing. Despite a very dirty war being fought by Microsoft, reportedly involving stacking committees and bribing national standards councils, the Microsoft alternative was not accepted as an international standard.

So, if you want to ensure that in 20 years time you can use information you are saving today, don't save it in the standard "default" format in your software. For documents I usually recommend "Rich Text Format" (rtf) or "Portable Document Format" (pdf) for documents not requiring editing. Better still, get yourself an office suite which supports Open Document Format, such as Openoffice or Abiword.

OK it's not as interesting as buying the latest gadget on EBay but it is important. At least it will be when you go looking for the recipe for that chocolate cake you haven't made for 10 years and then discover that you can't open it on your computer any more.