Comment by ilyt
3 years ago
>Future-proofing anything is a completely different dimension. You have to provide the independent way to bootstrap, without relying on the unbroken chain of software standards, business/legal entities, and the public demand in certain hardware platforms/architectures. This is unfeasible for the vast majority of knowledge/artifacts, so you also have to have a good mechanism to separate signal from noise and to transform volatile formats like JPEG or machine-executable code into more or less future proof representations, at least basic descriptions of what the notable thing did and what impact it had.
I'd argue that best way would be to not do that but to make sure format is ubiquitous enough that the knowledge will never be lost in the first place.
That, and use formats which can be accessed and explained concisely, like "read the first X bytes to metadata field A, then read the image payload by interpreting every three bytes as an RGB triplet until EOF" so that the information can be transmitted orally, in the off chance that becomes necessary
Hey I think I just described Windows 3.0-era PCX format :P