Re: Proprietary format "lock in"

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4577

Posted by 100341.2151
2005-11-10 20:53:40

Talal -

The issues you raise are very important ones, particularly when one is considering how to assemble one’s ideal toolkit. On the other hand…

Data portability can be a problem whether or not a reasonably stable future for a piece of software can be predicted. To take an example from genealogy, a powerful and well-established program such as The Master Genealogist may lock one into using it simply because it uses proprietory forms of data such as “witnesses”. The much-reviled but essential Gedcom (GEnealogical Data COMmunication standard) format for sharing data amongst genealogists, however, offers no easy way of handling such non-standard data. This often makes it impracticable for those with large databases containing huge numbers of witnesses to various events to move to new software.

Where software simply manipulates text (much of software discussed in this forum), the dangers of getting locked in are usually much smaller. Programs like Zoot, Grandview, askSam, etc., provide a range of standard exporting formats, and even ones like ContentSaver (v2, that is) offer bulk ways of exporting saved web-pages from its propietory database in *.htm standard format. The issue is usually more one of time and inconvenience than of flat impossibility.

It is also often relatively easy to query one’s data using decent indexed search programs (Wilbur, dtSearch and some others), even where the file format is proprietory, so long as the text is not compressed or encrypted in some way.

The problem, where there is one, usually lies with how the results of such searches are displayed. Ideally, one wants to see the results displayed in context, preferably in a format as close to that of the original file containing the research “hits” as possible (i.e., as if looking at the original Word file, Excel file, or Outlook email, or whatever).

Unfortunately, many Windows search programs can only provide this feature for a limited range of file formats (such the Microsoft ones above). For example, since the demise of Lotus Magellan (DOS), no modern indexed search programs have the required viewers to display search results from Grandview (DOS outliner) and Lotus Agenda (DOS free-form database) in their native formats.

Worse still, some modern indexed search programs cannot even index and search such files at all, even though the bulk of the file is made up of plain text - and this limitation may not only apply to discontinued file formats, but also to newer ones, such as those of Zoot and askSam.

For many people these are pretty arcane problems, and I wouldn’t want to over-emphasize them. I have long since exported my Agenda files to Zoot (using Zoot’s splendid importing facilities; Information Handler can also import them, too); and I know that I can relatively easily swap outlining files between Grandview and Brainstorm, or Inspiration, so I am not locked into GV.

I don’t expect any time soon to see Zoot or askSam files properly displayed by search programs. But I am happy (using dtSearch or Wilbur) to be able to search these files for text strings, along with all the other indexed file formats on my hard disk. It is often more important to know that one of my Zoot databases contains essential information than to know exactly where in the file the information is. For that task, I can always open the file in Zoot itself and search again.

Hope that helps.

Derek

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