>Two years ago nobody cared about HTML.
>In two years time, nobody will care for HTML ;-)
>
>Hence, the moral (its late at night here in Aussie land)
>is that whatever we build, it will be a legacy system,
>so we must make sure that if we embed X into Y, we can always
>get X out of Y and into Z.
Or even get whatever we value out of X and into W. If
the above is true for Y=HTML, it surely will also be true of X.
I am also minded of the consternation that I caused when I
said in a room full of non-chemists, that chemists still had
legacies from around 1860 that we needed to get X out
of. Hence on this premise, whatever we do in 1996 will
still need to be accessible in around 2150! Now, I
bet none of you have ever comtemplated that date before,
and yet its the sort of thing chemists do worry about!
Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY;
[log in to unmask]; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ (Eudora Pro 3.0)
|