Why you MUST care more than ever about file formats

Because you must. Trust me on this

Why you MUST care more than ever about file formats /img/digital-dark-age.jpg

Exactly eleven years ago, I put online the slides of a seminar of mine on file formats. Today, I feel the need to remind everybody that they should really be much more informed about file formats, for their own good, even if they could still live without ever touching a computer or smartphone. If anything, the topic is more important now than in 2009. This is one of the reviews I got back then:

“Historically a culture has been little more than nothing without its documents. The end of a civilization has been based usually in the destruction of its written knowledge. The speech of Mr. Fioretti shows how important for a culture is to warranty along the centuries the open interoperability of their documents and so the accurate preservation and transmission of the knowledge and customs of such civilization."

Today, even if “our files were REALLY doomed” because we use the “cloud”, nothing has changed. That is just another kind of long-term distruction of written knowledge. So please give yourself a favour, have a look at these slides, and act accordingly: