Presentation at the JStor Workshop in Bangalore, December 10, 2010, on sustainability and bit-rot in file formats and software for websites.

1. Sustainability and Bit-rot
Kiran Jonnalagadda, HasGeek
JStor Workshop, Bangalore, December 2010

2. Building Websites
Write a spec
Define a budget
Raise money
Hire a team
Build!

3. Maintaining Websites

4. Maintenance Problems
1. Team has changed
Original developers not available
New developers don’t understand the code
Rewriting easier than documenting and fixing old code
2. Software has to be upgraded
Software is not compatible; bit-rot has set in

5. What is bit-rot?
Software rot, also known as code rot or software
erosion or software decay or software entropy, is a
type of bit rot. It describes the perceived slow
deterioration of software over time that will
eventually lead to it becoming faulty, unusable, or
otherwise in need of maintenance. This is not a
physical phenomenon: the software does not
actually decay, but rather suffers from a lack of
being updated with respect to the changing
environment in which it resides. —Wikipedia

6. Old: Working on the metal
New: Software ecosystem

7. Beware of Forks:
You are alone on the path

8. “Functionality is an asset, but
code is a liability. I will say this
until you like it.” —Ted Dziuba

9. Pattern: Custom Fork
You want a website Your custom feature is a
popular request, so the
You found a CMS that has
CMS also adds it and
most of the wanted features
releases an update
Developer says he can add
Your custom version
the additional features you
implemented it differently,
want, so you commission it
so you can’t upgrade: you
Developer hands you code will lose data if you do
and moves on

10. What you should do
Never implement a custom Make it open source and
feature for yourself; the encourage adoption by
maintenance is also yours others; open source is
useless without adoption
When you get some
software written, give the Open source is a
developer an incentive to mechanism for distributing
maintain it without you the cost of maintenance to a
having to pay for it large number of others
Let the developer own it This is hard

11. It’s not just you
Software developers reinvent the wheel all the time, only to
regret it later; the itch to reinvent never goes away
“The shock of recognition came to me when I was sitting on
the bus and reading the RFC for NFS, intending to write an
NFS server on top of the ZODB so we could use grep and
CVS. Suddenly I sat up and thought ‘I have an object
database on top of a filesystem, and now I want to emulate a
filesystem on top of it. What am I doing? Why not just use a
filesystem in the first place?’” —A. M. Kuchling, April 2001

12. Software Upgrades
All major software systems evolve coping mechanisms
Windows DLL hell in the 3.x and Windows 95 era
Ubuntu 6-month upgrades
Preferences for any software application
Web app customization: themes, plugins, standard config

13. File Formats
PDF and HTML are stable;
files from 10 years ago still
open
PDF is not re-flowable;
suitable only for archiving
paper layouts
Archivability is still a
concern

14. Raw HTML is tedious
<h3>
What is HTML5?
</h3>
<p>
The term HTML5 has come to represent not just the new
version of hypertext markup language, but a suite of related
technologies and proposed standards. These include:
</p>
<ul>
<li>CSS3, Geo-location, Web Sockets, Canvas, Client Storage,
Audio and Video.</li>
<li>Rich Internet Apps enabled by Advanced JavaScript
Engines and Mobile Browsers.</li>
</ul>

15. Plain text markup
Markdown
### What is HTML5
The term HTML5 has come to represent not just the new
version of hypertext markup language, but a suite of
related technologies and proposed standards. These
include:
* CSS3, Geo-location, Web Sockets, Canvas, Client
Storage, Audio and Video.
* Rich Internet Apps enabled by Advanced JavaScript
Engines and Mobilewsers.

16. Plain text markup
MediaWiki
=== What is HTML5 ===
The term HTML5 has come to represent not just the new
version of hypertext markup language, but a suite of
related technologies and proposed standards. These
include:
* CSS3, Geo-location, Web Sockets, Canvas, Client
Storage, Audio and Video.
* Rich Internet Apps enabled by Advanced JavaScript
Engines and Mobilewsers.

17. Plain text markup
BBCode Each of these converts
easily readable plain text
Markdown
into HTML
MediaWiki
The original plain text
Textile should be archivable, but
each convertor is also
WikiCreole
subject to bit-rot
ReStructuredText
There’s safety in numbers;
And many more... how many use them?

18. Published text: ePub
Reflowable content; no fixed
paper size
Single archive file contains
everything
The most promising archive
format
Two incompatible sub-formats:
XHTML and DTBook

19. Image credits
Haulin’ rust, macro rust on a micro bus, thumbs up, thumbs
down, fork in the road