Software

"Futureproofing" is the attempt to protect one's informational content from changes that the future often brings to available software and hardware platforms. By mindfully selecting the format of the information, one can better assure that the rich content of information is not lost to the onslaught of change.

New platforms often provide rich new features for the presentation of your information. I usually think that's great, but often find remorse when committing to write content that is rich in new features (e.g. colors, images/icons, alphabets & symbols, font types, background gradients, etc.).

I think it's in a computer hacker's nature to loathe outdated standards. My father (trained as a draftsman) always wrote in ALL UPPER CASE. By today's standards, the use of ALL CAPITALS is considered the same as shouting; it's rude. My mother, on the other hand, wrote nothing but cursive. That is more socially acceptable, but faces greater perils over time. Todays schools are abandoning the teaching of cursive writing. Such hand scripts are at increasing risk of being unreadable to our progeny. Worse yet, when she experienced the worstening symptoms of ALS, her ability to write legibly quickly vanished.

Still, I myself hate the idea of being confined to a 26 letter alphabet with a handful of punctuation marks. (There was a Dr. Seuss book entitled "On Beyond Zebra!" that invented twenty new letters) Mathematicians are used to more alphabets and symbols to communicate their abstracted (less vocal) thoughts in richer concise terms. For that reason, I find it hard to imagine life without the Unicode glyphs of today.

(more to follow later.)