Formatting for the Future

Anonymous Patron writes Formatting for the Future – August 2006 Massachusetts leaders had a seemingly simple idea: Government documents produced by word processing, spreadsheet, database or presentation software belong to the public record, and therefore, should be created and stored in open formats that aren’t tied to a particular program.

Massachusetts reasoned that storing electronic documents in proprietary formats might create situations where documents were held hostage by those formats. Important public documents could be rendered all but inaccessible when the applications that created them went out of style. This is where Massachusetts’ simple idea got complicated.”