Jeni's Musings

Photos are an interesting case. I took, in four or five years, thousands of black and white images. They’re all carefully preserved in boxes and still easily decoded with my eyeballs.

Thing is, in about the same period, I’ve taken an order of magnitude more photographs since I started working with a digital camera. I hold on to my precious film cameras (a Minolta SRT 101 and my last addition, a Minolta X-700). But I’m not going back.

The trade off is that I know I will spend the rest of my life periodically dragging those bits up hill. Converting them to new standards as they evolve so that nothing is lost.

I can do that for one technology, maybe two, but not for all of them. Instead, I use XML for as much as I can. Because unlike those old seven bit (probably) tapes, I’ll always be able to read the XML.