[HN Gopher] Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authen...
___________________________________________________________________
Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)
Author : yumiris
Score : 132 points
Date : 2022-03-02 10:59 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.miris.design)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.miris.design)
| jauco wrote:
| Real archivists (as in people that have archivist as a job
| description and work at places that have "storing data forever"
| as a mission statement) tend to store the data in multiple
| formats. The source + a few derivations. They also store a bunch
| of copies to ward against bitrot. And they periodically compare
| the copies.
|
| Real archivists use a lot of data :)
| VariableStar wrote:
| IMO the question is more about which standards are used, rather
| than specifying an specific format. In particular, using open and
| free standards and formats increases the chance to retrieve and
| use data after long time storage. Different formats suit
| different data types.
| a1445c8b wrote:
| s/comprise of/comprise/g
| copperx wrote:
| > but dismissing or abandoning media files is a much more
| guaranteed potential loss of information - information which
| plain text cannot capture due to its limitations.
|
| Some examples are sorely needed. How is a Word/InDesign file more
| authentic than a plain text file? Or is the author talking about
| media? Is a ProTools session more authentic than Wav files?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Is a ProTools session more authentic than Wav files?_
|
| Dunno about 'authentic', but since the part you've quoted
| specifically talks about "loss of information", the WAV files
| indeed incur loss of information compared to a ProTools
| session.
|
| E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss all
| the individual channels, for starters.
|
| If it's multiple wav files with all the channels as stems, it
| will still miss the effect chain settings (and hardcode them in
| the final result), the MIDI notes (hardcoded as the rendered
| VST output), session markers, tempo change tracks, and other
| such things.
| falcolas wrote:
| > E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss
| all the individual channels, for starters.
|
| A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not
| everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what
| does make it from the notes to the book, and how it's
| changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't
| consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it
| doesn't also come with all the author's notes.
|
| So, if it's not in the final mix, it's because it's not
| supposed to be in the final mix; it's not that the data is
| lost because of technical limitations. And like notes from a
| book, unless you throw them away, they're not going anywhere.
|
| On a more technical note, underneath the hood, the recorded
| items are all stored as .wav files too...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not
| everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what
| does make it from the notes to the book, and how it 's
| changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't
| consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it
| doesn't also come with all the author's notes._
|
| Yeah, not really.
|
| In music, for starters, a DAW session is like the recording
| reels from the analog days. And artists, producers, and
| studios go back to those reels a lot, for many reasons: to
| later clean up, rebalance, and release a "remastered
| version", to adapt to a new format (e.g. Apple/Dolby's
| spatial audio or some 5:1 surround mix), or simply to give
| individual parts to collaborators to make a remix of the
| track, or even just for the artists themselves to plunder
| it for parts to reuse in later works.
|
| What your comment misses is that we're talking about the
| author here, not the reader.
|
| The author (or in the DAW session case, the
| producer/artist) is the one who would be having the
| original format, and have a choice to keep their stuff as a
| ProTools session or wav stems, or as a text file or some
| proprietary format.
|
| So while you "personally, don't consider a book to be
| "lossy" or unauthentic because it doesn't also come with
| all the author's notes.", the author would indeed be
| furious if we needed his notes and couldn't open them
| because he wrote his first book+notes in some editor/format
| since discontinued, and he now only has the final printed
| or ebook text.
|
| > _On a more technical note, underneath the hood, the
| recorded items are all stored as .wav files too..._
|
| Which is neither here nor there regarding the things I've
| mentioned as lost (e.g. the fx chains used with their
| settings for re-toggleability, sequenced notes, automation
| curves, and so on), and is also not generally true across
| DAWs, depends on the DAW whether they'd use some
| proprietary format.
| falcolas wrote:
| Perhaps this is a protools vs. Reaper thing, but none of
| that is ever lost in Reaper. So long as I don't get rid
| of the directory, I will not lose any of that. And, if
| we're talking about the producer, creating the final mix
| doesn't lose any of the authenticity of their session.
|
| I'm probably missing something, but between wav files and
| the metadata (which is, IIRC, marked up text files in
| Reaper), the producer will never lose anything.
|
| EDIT: Confirmed, .rpp files (and most of the plugins) are
| text files. So, best of both worlds - longevity AND
| authenticity (and infinite undo).
| lallysingh wrote:
| I've read some docs with ASCII art diagrams far more complex
| than the medium really allowed.
|
| I would have preferred PDF/A
| briandoll wrote:
| I assume this is a response to Derek Sivers post: Write Plain
| Text Files https://sive.rs/plaintext
|
| I've been using computers daily for about 35 years now and I have
| a _lot_ of plain text files that I regularly use -- notes, lists,
| outlines, quotes, links, etc. Does anyone who has been around a
| while, have a large multi-decade collection of texts that are
| _not_ plain text? What formats do you use? How do you maintain
| access to those files over time?
| paxys wrote:
| My MP3 collection has been going on for at least 25 years and
| still works perfectly. Same for HTML pages (I have entire
| websites backed up from the early 90s). I still have Wordstar
| and Word 1.0 files which I can open and edit. I can't think of
| too many pieces of software or data formats from the last 30-40
| years which achieved some threshold of popularity but have no
| support today.
| jjav wrote:
| > My MP3 collection has been going on for at least 25 years
| and still works perfectly.
|
| Mine as well (maybe not quite 25 but close). But music isn't
| written word, clearly it wouldn't be in an ASCII text file.
|
| The key is universal, non-proprietary formats that are
| supported by thousands of open source applications. Those are
| the formats that will last a lifetime and beyond. So, plain
| text for the written word (HTML counts as plain text, you can
| read and write it in any plain text editor), JPG for
| pictures, MP3 for music.
|
| For video there doesn't seem to be an answer that is fully
| satisfactory, that I feel confident I can still view in 50
| years. So I mostly take photos, not much video, since I can't
| trust the longevity of video.
| briandoll wrote:
| MP3 is a good one. Although I had to develop a lot of perl to
| manage the various incantations of ID3 tags, especially when
| VBR became popular. MP3 files may still play, but the full
| experience (properly attributed w/ band, album, song title,
| song number, album art, etc.) is likely less than perfect
| over time.
|
| Do Wordstar files open in modern Word applications, even on
| iOS? That's part of the access aspect over the long term --
| files that can be used, everyday, with your daily-driver
| tools with minimal special software needed.
| yumiris wrote:
| This was concocted at 5AM -- my apologies for any peculiar
| sentence structures or odd phrasing.
|
| Will re-re-re-revise it again with fresh eyes after resting 'em!
| davbryn1 wrote:
| "Prioritising the longevity of data can sacrifice the
| authenticity of what it tries to capture and preserve. When I say
| authenticity, I refer to how accurate and detailed the data in
| question preserves a particular state. An original raw image, for
| example, will capture a landscape much more authentically than
| written text would. Written text will inevitably comprise of
| ambiguity and even bias, if not distortion."
|
| Or, you need to become a better writer.
| ggm wrote:
| he said.. in courier, monospaced paragraphs format, morally as
| close to "plaintext" as you can be with a couple of diagrams
| which could have been ASCII art...
| kleiba wrote:
| That is not a contradiction. The OP is just arguing that you
| should use the best medium + format for the job - and sometimes
| simple text is sufficient (as it says in the article).
| ciphol wrote:
| Ironically, the "pro plain text" link posted earlier used lots
| of formatting.
|
| I don't see why pure plain text is better in any way than plain
| text with formatting, like a simplified form of HTML (<a>, <b>,
| <sup>, some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-
| proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better
| than pure text.
|
| Images have their own value, as do animations and video on
| occasion. Here matters become more complicated - image formats
| are generally non-human-readable and non-diffable (though SVG
| or a similar format could solve those problems for schematic-
| type images) and image conversions generally involve data loss.
| For starters, though, one should at least use a non-proprietary
| format for images and video.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _like a simplified form of HTML ( <a>, <b>, <sup>, some kind
| of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary,
| easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure
| text._
|
| Yes, but, the problem isn't typically being proprietary, when
| it comes to future use, but a closed, non standard, unknown
| format.
|
| Yet you're creating a new standard here, with your own rules,
| which no one will understand, and which no automated tools
| can convert to another format.
|
| (Eg _some kind of table formatting_ )
|
| Better to be 100% html than this.
|
| (Maybe you meant that, but regardless, this is a good place
| for me to comment on standards being more important than
| anything else.)
| mro_name wrote:
| > no one will understand
|
| that's a bit harsh.
|
| And frankly, I don't understand 100% english either, but
| still we use it to communicate.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The point isn't that you can learn it, but instead,
| having to learn it by examining it in depth, always
| wondering if there are things not used yet (does the doc
| you look at, only show part of the standard in its
| formatting? Imagine a doc not using a tag, but the tag is
| in other docs...), and then, writing code to covert it.
|
| Standards exist for a reason.
|
| We already have issues with people not understanding
| specs, and writing data out of spec, even with that spec
| in RFC's!
| mro_name wrote:
| my favourite is the spec that was changed after the fact:
|
| _Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake
| of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time
| separated by (say) a space character._
|
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339#section-5.6
|
| But what harm does it to restrict oneself to a few html
| tags?
| alanbernstein wrote:
| As the pro-plain-text post said: HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX,
| and many other standard formats, are just plain text.
| mro_name wrote:
| No, not when it comes to what reading person they target.
|
| Here text/plain is the only that works for e.g. my mother.
| gwern wrote:
| And if the diagrams had been ASCII art diagrams (eg
| https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/1498541884796542977 ),
| OP could fix the typo in the diagram with a keystroke.
| yumiris wrote:
| Cheers for the heads-up on the typo. The diagram's an SVG,
| with the labels being in plain ASCII. One keystroke is all it
| took indeed! :P
|
| On the serious side, ASCII art diagrams are splendid and I
| very often use them myself, though they can get quite complex
| and thus messy to maintain. There comes a certain point where
| they lose their simplicity, sadly.
| lbriner wrote:
| Exactly. The OP said what they needed to in plain text because
| it captures what they wanted to say in the simplest format.
|
| If they had needed to convey an image or contextual information
| like some rich API spec, they would presumably have used
| something else.
| llarsson wrote:
| That "some" proprietary formats from the 80's and 90's are still
| readable is already causing real problems: because not *all* are.
| So text, possibly with Markdown or similar hints regarding
| emphasis and structure, is still vastly better than any
| alternative I can think of.
| dhosek wrote:
| I bumped into this recently with a couple Kodak PhotoCDs I
| uncovered last month. Trying to get the pictures out of the PCD
| files is turning out to be more challenging than I expected.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Is ImageMagick not doing the job? It's been a while, but
| Photoshop used to be pretty adept at this as well.
| js2 wrote:
| I converted mine years ago using iPhoto but according to
| Wikipedia, there are several programs that can do the
| conversion:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_CD#Converting_Photo_CD_i.
| ..
| mro_name wrote:
| what was the issue - hardware access (a CD reader), bit rot
| or else?
|
| The image format was jpeg if I remember correctly, wasn't it?
| mark-r wrote:
| I don't think it was JPEG, it was a custom format that
| contained multiple resolutions.
| sleepycatgirl wrote:
| Yup. Or .org for that matter,
| c0balt wrote:
| Additionally the option to (relatively) easily transform
| markdown or richtext to another format is a great when you want
| to try a new tool and/or format.
| eddieroger wrote:
| That's the real secret, I think, keeping content up to date.
| Text isn't the only medium that can be treated that way, too.
| My family converted lots of analog audio and video tapes to
| DVD some years ago, and I immediately turned around and
| ripped them to digital, lossless types and stored them on a
| few hard drives and eventually a cloud backup. Will FLAC and
| MP4 last forever? Nope, probably not, but if I check in on
| these files every few years, update the players that I've
| saved (VLC), and periodically convert them to newer formats,
| I feel comfortable that my grandchildren will be able to hear
| their great-great-grandparents' road trip to California, or
| see video of my bar mitzvah on whatever screen they're using
| years from now.
| nayuki wrote:
| Nitpick - DVD _is_ digital. When you said "digital", you
| probably meant "computer file based" format, as opposed to
| a physical disc format.
|
| Similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682996
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more
| pedantic than I think it needs to be.
|
| I don't think anyone _really_ argues that everything should be
| plain text, even if that 's an easy shorthand. The real argument
| is "use the simplest, most open format possible."
|
| Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos,
| transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then
| delete the image. But, if you want to view those same photos when
| you're fifty years old, or seventy-five, you're better off
| storing them as a JPEG than a PSD, and you're better off storing
| them on a hard drive you have access to in addition to whatever
| cloud they're currently occupying.
|
| "Write plain text" is a shorthand for "use open formats." Because
| so much of what this audience does is test-based, plain text is
| the most common format we use, from source code to journaling,
| but that message applies to pretty much anything: if you lock
| yourself into a proprietary format, or a proprietary editor, you
| will almost certainly lose data over the long term.
| Zak wrote:
| It's a response to this, which does advocate the use of literal
| plain text files where possible: https://sive.rs/plaintext
|
| The author mentions converting to other open, text-based
| formats like HTML and LaTeX for publishing and writes:
|
| > _Keep your graphics files alongside your text files. But keep
| your text as plain text._
| pdonis wrote:
| _> It 's a response to this_
|
| Seems more like a misunderstanding of it than a response. As
| you quote explicitly from the Sivers article, he is talking
| about keeping _text_ as plain text, not about keeping images
| as plain text. And the Miris article is basically saying the
| same thing (at the end he even says plain text is still his
| first choice), yet appears to think he 's giving some kind of
| opposing viewpoint.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be
| plain text Plain text just works, everywhere,
| all the time. --
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30525605
| raman162 wrote:
| I got the same feeling as well. Open formats and avoiding
| proprietary lock-in is what the spirit of "write in plain text"
| is about.
| mark-r wrote:
| I took a different conclusion from the plain text article.
| The argument isn't about open formats, it's really about
| plain text, simply because there's no need to have a tool to
| make use of it. Even open formats can get abandoned and
| become unusable.
| paxys wrote:
| > I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be
| plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand
|
| Pretty sure this article is a rebuttal to the front page post
| on HN yesterday which said exactly that
| necovek wrote:
| I took the original article on plain text to mean that you
| should aim for plain text formats which are human-readable even
| without specific tools to process them.
|
| Thus HTML, Markdown and LaTeX make sense:
| \begin{document} Blah ...
|
| Is completely understandable to a reader even 50 years down the
| line, even if they don't have LaTeX on-hand.
|
| But, it does bring an interesting counter-point: what does
| $$\frac{1}{n}$$ mean (to not even bring up more complex
| examples). It's probably no surprise that LaTeX is the _lingua
| franca_ of math _input_ because it brings in terseness,
| simplicity and _some_ readability to plain text. Still, it 's a
| programming language, so literally all bets are off in a
| document (you can redefine \frac to mean something else
| entirely).
|
| I guess both articles, as noted elsewhere, attempt to nail down
| one familiar truth: use the simplest expression possible, but
| not simpler. One thinks that's always plain-text except for
| images, but there are just more contexts where this applies.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| I think you've over corrected too far in the other direction.
|
| "Write plain text" is definitely not a shorthand for "use open
| formats".
|
| PDF is an open format.
|
| Approximately nobody who says "write plain text" thinks putting
| everything in PDF is an acceptable alternative.
|
| They don't even want you writing in HTML, for that matter. They
| want Markdown.
|
| They really do mean something fairly close to "plain text".
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| To quote myself:
|
| > The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format
| possible."
|
| For most collections of words, that means Markdown, not PDF.
| But if the words you're saving are a mortgage document or
| power of attorney, PDF is actually a better choice.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I'm never going to write directly in PDF, but if I want to
| preserve something? 100% I will save it as a PDF if it's
| document-like.
| logifail wrote:
| > Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos,
| transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then
| delete the image. But, if you want to view those same photos
| when you're fifty years old, or seventy-five, you're better off
| storing them as a JPEG than a PSD, and you're better off
| storing them on a hard drive you have access to in addition to
| whatever cloud they're currently occupying.
|
| OTOH there are many photos I have, taken a decade or two ago,
| where I wish I'd written down my thoughts and reactions at the
| time, rather than just taken the picture. A picture may be
| worth a thousand words, but _just having lots of pictures_ and
| no contemporaneous words, leaves more of a gap the longer ago
| it was.
| Vivtek wrote:
| This is an excellent point. I've been trying to go back and
| fix that, by correlating pictures with journal entries or
| blog posts and the like. I wish I'd taken better notes about
| who all these people were and what they meant to me at the
| time.
| lawkwok wrote:
| Apple Photos and I'm sure many other photo clients has a
| caption feature that lets you type notes for a picture. I
| haven't hit into any character limits so you could
| presumably write a journal entry for each image.
| lisper wrote:
| This is the reason I'm still runnins OSX Mavericks. I have
| a HUGE investment in iPhoto in the form of curated albums
| and photo captions. All attempts to migrate the iPhoto
| albums to Photos have failed. So I keep Mavericks machines
| mainly so I don't lose my iPhoto albums.
| mekoka wrote:
| Spot on.
|
| A few years ago, when on a hike, if I came about some
| beautiful scenery, out came the camera. I'd spend most of the
| time capturing images with the device, rather than take in
| the landscape through my own senses.
|
| Later, I'd look at those photos and noticed that they failed
| to convey a great deal of the emotional dimension. Now, I
| spend more time looking at the landscape, trying to notice
| all the details, and only take one or two snapshots. The idea
| of writing down my thoughts and reactions is worthwhile, or
| for practicality, maybe just audio record them and transcribe
| later.
| spc476 wrote:
| I have a ton of family photos where I'm lucky if someone
| scribbled the year on the back; a bit more lucky if it's the
| month and year. The number of photos where names were written
| is way far less ("I remember Bob, but who is standing next to
| him?" "I don't know.").
|
| Also, the 70s and early 80s were a bit more orange than I
| remember.
| nicbou wrote:
| There doesn't need to be a compromise. You can have both if you
| keep your data in multiple formats. Storage is cheap and text
| files are small.
|
| My timeline thing [0] keeps the original archives, stores the
| timeline entries in a database, and exports them hourly as JSON +
| files. If the code stops working or the database crashes, the
| files are still there. The automated backups are there too. No
| information is lost.
|
| However, the richness is not lost in the process. This timeline
| has geolocation history, notebook scans and a bunch of other
| things that don't really translate to plain text.
|
| The most important difference is that I can write to my timeline
| from my phone. Managing text files across devices is quite
| troublesome by comparison. If I want plain text out of it, I can
| write a new Destination that pipes entries to plain text files or
| to a fax machine.
|
| [0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline
| titzer wrote:
| > What ultimately matters is that information is captured and
| preserved as thoroughly as possible. Between a picture that
| expresses a thousand words, and plain text file that sacrifices
| its detail and authenticity, why wouldn't we choose the former?
| Indeed, this question applies even the choice may sacrifice the
| longevity. What's the point of longevity, when the pursuit of it
| can compromise our ability to capture the information we may be
| afraid of possibly losing?
|
| I would contend that capturing a picture is absolutely a massive
| distortion of reality because reality is three dimensional,
| exists in many spectra beyond visible light, has sounds, smells,
| taste, and feeling, and exists in a historical context. The
| selection of framing, distance, focus, all of these are biases of
| the photographer. A photo is a lie, too. Just because it's higher
| resolution doesn't mean it has indeed captured the right
| information.
|
| Text is a lie too, granted. But in our current digitization
| zeitgeist, we have forgotten that our media (pictures, video,
| recordings, not just the TV, cable, and internet) lie to us. Our
| own bias towards slicing apart the world into computer-digestible
| bits is just us lying more convincingly to ourselves.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Whenever choosing a markup, image format, or other technologies,
| keep the Lindy effect in mind. A boring technology that has been
| around for a long time will survive a lot longer and a brand new
| shiny one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| quasarj wrote:
| Wrote a whole article about not using plain text. Used plain text
| for everything except a useless image. A+++
| amiga1200 wrote:
| The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in plain text.
| wl wrote:
| In a complicated, undocumented format that had to be reverse-
| engineered (Sumerian/Akkadian/Hittite cuneiform).
| brians wrote:
| "all the binary formats of the 1990s can be opened today"
|
| Oh, sweet summer child. Scribe/mss. Koalapad. A bunch of Apple
| 2GS, Apple 3, and Lisa formats. Lotus Improv.
|
| The points about semantics and authenticity are wonderful, but I
| think the presumption that all formats can be opened is mistaken
| exactly because those that can't be opened become effectively
| invisible and lost.
| mark-r wrote:
| Survivorship bias it's called.
| dade_ wrote:
| MD for all things text and SVG journals for handwritten notes,
| diagrams, sketches, screenshots. Works great, but haven't found a
| way to integrate them beyond using a common set of folders.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...SVG journals for handwritten...
|
| Would you kindly clarify this? Did you mean scan in handwritten
| material but save it in a scalable image format like SVG? I'm
| quite interested but maybe i'm not capturing what you mean
| here, because i have not had my breakfast. :-)
| necovek wrote:
| Not GP and I have no idea if they meant this, but "smart"
| vectorization/tracing would be ideal when use of touchscreen
| pens is impossible (still doesn't capture the angle a pen is
| being held at, but we are getting close).
|
| For the state of the art, look up "image tracing".
| mxuribe wrote:
| Thanks, I'll look up image tracing.
| dade_ wrote:
| I use Write (iPad/Windows/Ubuntu/Android) to take handwritten
| notes and jot info. I first started using SVG on my Sony
| eReader, it used this vector format.
| http://www.styluslabs.com/
| Annatar wrote:
| "This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing
| and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs
| to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
|
| http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html
| eatmygodetia wrote:
| I feel like a lot of use plain text proponents forget that
| outside of ASCII and now UTF-8, lots of alleged plain text
| documents with diacritics or non-latin characters are at least
| slightly difficult to open because of their somewhat esoteric
| encodings. Plain text isn't as universal as it is often claimed,
| although it is immensely simpler than some other formats.
|
| But maybe we should all use monochrome bitmap files for
| everything? That would be very simple.
| smasher164 wrote:
| I think for a plaintext format to be "complete", it needs some
| mechanism of associating the language with some segment of
| text. Plaintext formats that don't acknowledge unified
| characters are just Latin-biased.
| eatmygodetia wrote:
| that's basically point - you can open an ascii file now
| because utf-8 is ascii oriented, but a utf-8 first editor
| will struggle with an old french text file for example. plain
| text has inbuilt biases which have changed over time, it's
| not as pure as simple as people say.
| tombert wrote:
| That's something I've always thought; plain text is pure
| and wonderful for _me_ , an Anglo-writing American, because
| most of these formats were written for people like me.
|
| I suspect for nearly every other language (or at least any
| language that doesn't use the ~100 characters/symbols used
| in the English alphabet), old ASCII text isn't terribly
| useful.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| Yes, I feel this in my bones as someone who previously worked
| for a text messaging provider. Plain text has the deceptive
| appearance of simplicity, but it is actually one of the most
| maddening things to get right, especially if you intend to
| support the accurate transmission of said text to any possible
| text message receiving device in the world.
| jjav wrote:
| That is why I tend to always keep files in plain ASCII, even
| though two out of my three primary languages need characters
| not in ASCII.
|
| File longevity wins over grammatical correctness most of the
| time for me. I have text files going back to the 80s, so I'm
| glad I didn't use any fancier software to write them as they'd
| be completely unreadable today.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| If it's 2022 and someone is _still_ saving plaintext in a non-
| Unicode encoding where going with Unicode is a perfectly viable
| option, I will personally ensure that (figuratively) they are
| burnt at the stake.
|
| In addition to UTF-8, my language happens to have ~2 additional
| code pages/Latin based encodings. Some websites still serve (or
| very recently used to serve) text files in such broken
| encodings, so I have to convert such files before use. It's
| deeply unpleasant. Windows has supported UTF-8 in some fashion
| for over 15 years, get with the program people.
|
| (I would make an exception for preserving historical non-UTF-8
| files in their original byte-exact form, for the same reason
| that I wouldn't digitise an analogue photograph and then burn
| the original - but let's be real, all such files have been
| created by now)
| gandalfff wrote:
| Plain text is fine for some things but lacking for others. I like
| GUIs for formatting. I wouldn't be surprised if my ODTs could be
| opened a thousand years from now.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I think longevity is not just an issue of the data format but
| more so of its organization. It so happens that text files
| organized using the file system is the most easily producible,
| maintainable and queryable data organization tool. But other
| media can have the same properties if they're organized using the
| file system rather than any complex tools. I have graphs and
| datasheets that have endured decades that I refer to often and
| are easily findable because they are well-named files in well-
| named folders, even though the formats are comparatively much
| more complex.
| jdvh wrote:
| Plain text is so compelling because it's as simple as it gets,
| you can bring your own editor, you own your own data, and you can
| use version control.
|
| Text+ is compelling because you can have images and some kind of
| formatting. You want to store metadata and have backlinks and
| tags. Ideally with the possibility of collaborative editing.
|
| There should be a way to fuse these two.
| Geezus-42 wrote:
| The latter sounds like Obsidian or Logseq or most other
| markdown editors.
| m348e912 wrote:
| This might be off topic but in terms of communication such as
| email, plain text seems the most authentic format to me. For
| example, if you are one of those sales guys that bolds and
| highlights the important parts of an email that you send, it's
| off-putting. The only exception I would give is if you wanted to
| add an inline image or an emoji -- everything else, plain text.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about
| text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of
| content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is
| wrestling with.
|
| The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's
| where it gets interesting.
|
| I used to set my students a question about information content in
| a class on the philosophy of procedural representation.
|
| We had a very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer
| Amelia Earhart, and a short grainy video clip of her getting into
| a plane and smiling and waving.
|
| My question was: Which one of these two media conveys more
| information about Amelia?
|
| One gave extraordinary detail of her face, eyes, and seemed to
| many was a much better "fidelity" document. Others noticed that
| although you couldn't see her face in the video, you could feel
| from her gait, waving, body language and the way she shook hands
| _much more_ about her than from the static photo.
|
| Both files are the same size in bytes.
|
| So which one has more "information"? Which one is more
| "authentic"?
|
| Not to attempt to answer here with a deep dive into
| phenomenology, but each carries a different kind of information,
| which can be static, dynamic, or meta-dynamic in higher orders
| relative to a matrix of assumptions that must be carried forward
| in parallel by the culture that wants to decode the message
| later.
|
| I like that Miris tries to explore this by questioning the
| richness of text. But maybe the question doesn't hold up well
| under those conditions of investigation - because one might say
| that a great poet using only a few words might capture a
| landscape better than a painting, but if our culture drifts
| toward a visual one where poetry is no longer understood we
| cannot say that the medium itself degraded.
| Moru wrote:
| A digital format needs to be as simple as possible. If you need
| a 1000 page long definition for the word document format to be
| able to get the information out of it, it's not really good for
| anything when the format is forgotten.
| aasasd wrote:
| > _very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia
| Earhart_
|
| I thought photo quality was rather meh until the 50s or at
| least the 40s? Even with large films the results are often
| muddy in olden shots--while 70 mm movie film from the 60s will
| probably still be redigitized into super-duper-hd formats in
| the late 21st century (e.g. https://youtu.be/sCv-dIFGcd0).
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Yeah, it was taken in like 1938 or something. Scanned using
| modern gear. Of course, it's surprising how much detail comes
| out of chemical photography of that era. But you're right,
| the "resolution" is arbitrary and probably oversampled.
| adzm wrote:
| There are a bunch of crisp photographs from the late 30s. The
| hard part was getting the subject to stay still long enough
| and not blur the background, since the higher resolution /
| finer grain required a longer exposure time / wider aperture.
| You can check out various archives for examples,
| https://www.shorpy.com/ is one.
| kubb wrote:
| I think the thought experiment still "works" (as much as
| philosophers can say something useful about the question it
| poses) even if the photo was upscaled.
| nicbou wrote:
| Have a look at Ansel Adam's photography. The sharpness is
| outstanding.
| aposm wrote:
| This is not quite correct... For motion picture film, yes,
| anything older than the 70mm film you're talking about tends
| to be low-resolution because of the physical constraints of
| moving a foot or more of film through a camera each second.
| However, still photos from that era were much better - the
| limitations of film stocks were lighting, and with enough
| light to gather, a large format photo could be extremely
| sharp and high-resolution (if that was the priority). It
| sounds like this is referring to a formal portrait setting,
| with potentially very bright studio lighting and high quality
| film, so it could easily be sharper than all but very recent
| digital cameras (as large-format film still is).
| II2II wrote:
| Then there is the value of the written word. While the grainy
| video may reveal more than the high resolution photograph, the
| written word may reveal more than a grainy (or high resolution)
| video. A diary is much better at exposing motivations,
| emotions, the perceived relevance of events. A newspaper
| article can articulate the events of a day much better than a
| film that captures a fragment of time in the framed image of
| space. It's not that written accounts are necessarily better on
| these accounts (one could, for example, have a video diary). It
| is simply that they turn out to be better than the often
| fragmentary accounts from higher fidelity sources.
|
| (It is also worth noting that these higher fidelity sources are
| often left to decay or are intentionally destroyed due to the
| difficulty and expense of maintaining them.)
| nicbou wrote:
| I agree. My written travel journals are far more interesting
| than the pictures, because they show how I actually felt
| while I was there, with all the little stories that go with
| the trip.
| gilleain wrote:
| I'm curious : what is "meta-dynamic" information?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Good question. So as I see it: something that's about
| generative behaviours. For example: The rules that describe
| the dynamics of generative systems like Collatz (n%2==0 ? n'
| = n/2 : n'=3*n+1) there's specific integers that make it work
| while for a Lorenz attractor you'd have three floats that
| could take different initial values. That would be a
| conversation about "meta-dynamics".
|
| Or maybe, what changes are behind systems that change?
| cupofpython wrote:
| ngl I am also curious about meta-dynamic information and I
| do not think this response helped me understand the
| definition much.
|
| Do you mean the rules for Collatz are the meta-dynamic
| information? because from the rules we can generate
| additional information dynamically?
|
| Are you able to describe it a different, less mathematical,
| way maybe?
|
| for example, can meta-dynamic information be observed by
| seeing the way someone jumps up and down?
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I get what the author is trying to say, and I certainly agree.
| Sometimes you simply need it to look a certain way or use an
| image that cannot be summarized in text in a meaningful way in
| order to get your point across.
|
| All those monks slaving away doing doodles in the margins
| weren't just staving off carpal tunnel. There's meaning there
| you can't get any other way. Before Man could write, Man made
| art.
|
| The other HN article about "plaintext only" I also agree with.
| HTML is the synthesis of the two. Sometimes I forget what a
| great idea and a blessing HTML is. Even if you don't have a
| browser that can render it, reading an HTML document isn't
| difficult if it isn't festooned with auto-generated nonsense.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| It would be interesting to compare the video and the photo to a
| similarly-sized excerpt of her writing.
| causi wrote:
| _one might say that a great poet using only a few words might
| capture a landscape better than a painting, but if our culture
| drifts toward a visual one where poetry is no longer understood
| we cannot say that the medium itself degraded._
|
| That has little to do with the medium. If the painter takes as
| much effort as the poet, and the viewer as much time and effort
| as the reader, just as much information and emotion can be
| gleaned from the painting as the poem.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| The medium can matter in both cases, in the sense that the
| medium is not just the format, but also the cultural context
| of interpretation. There can be subtleties in word choice
| that evoke shared stories, or word connotations or otherwise
| make reference outside the work itself. You can have the same
| references in the form of visual symbols, stylistic choices
| or more. The viewer/reader must make much more effort to gain
| that cultural context for interpretation, which may very well
| be lost or degraded over time.
|
| I would posit that while a painting has can be very high
| context, that the tendency is for poetry to be even more
| context dependent. Transplanted outside its native culture, I
| suspect visual works (again, on the margin) can be grasped
| with more depth by the viewer than than a reader of the (on
| the margin) poem.
| thematrixadmin wrote:
| What about writing data in markdown format, physically on the
| HDD. You can use bunch of different both online and local tools
| which will probably stay supported in the future. There is also
| no problem with implementing your own markdown editor (nice side,
| pet project as well). I store and run small server on my RPi,
| accessible through my phone and desktop. If I'd like to show the
| text to somebody I can easily copy it as a plain text, Word
| format or export it to HTML or PDF.
| dang wrote:
| Related large thread from yesterday:
|
| _Write plain text files_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 - March 2022 (345
| comments)
| orzig wrote:
| Render to ASCII, everyone wins! (e.g. https://ascii-
| generator.site/)
| aasasd wrote:
| I got quite a lot of use out of metadata over the years, such
| that now I'll probably get a nervous itch and tremors all over my
| body if I attempt to use _just_ plain text. Specifically, the
| creation and modification times for each addition to my notes are
| rather valuable, especially with the work-from-home lifestyle aka
| 'day fades into night into day'--with which more people are gonna
| be familiarized in these years.
|
| Thankfully I'm using Org-mode these days, which is reasonably
| 'plain text' under practical definitions--but I make dozens new
| headings every week, and each of them is stamped with the
| creation time. But boy do I miss having modification times too--
| should probably finally set up automatic commits to Git. Also
| need to mess with Orgzly so that it marks notes that are created
| on the phone.
| gilleain wrote:
| Indeed, digital archives use (I understand) various metadata
| standards such as:
|
| https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-t...
|
| or 'Dublin core' which is RDF.
| dv35z wrote:
| Can you touch on your org-mode journey, setup & current flow? I
| am just starting the journey - looking to have a fairly
| coherent notes/todo/planning/contacts/kb system, and have
| (portions of) it published out to a static website. Emacs is...
| something else.
| aasasd wrote:
| Eeeh, I already see from your description that your needs are
| different from mine, and Emacs and Org-mode tend to be
| customized by everyone to their smallest wants. You won't
| find a shortage of articles about Org, including here on HN.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I supplement my workflow with some judicious use of text-
| expander macros. I can type a total of three characters for the
| current date-stamp, or four for a date + timestamp. This makes
| it easy to reflexively date literally anything systemwide: from
| archive filenames, to code comments, to config file tweaks, to
| actual notes.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| What are some things you use modification times for?
| aasasd wrote:
| When I used Evernote and my notes were larger in scale, I
| mostly used the modification time to figure out how long a
| particular note was lying around without updates--so
| abandoned-forgotten projects and such stuff, basically
| tracking how much I actually use the notes.
|
| (Evernote went to shit over the years, so don't take this as
| an endorsement.)
|
| Sometimes it's also useful to figure out what I was doing
| when writing a note, by placing the time among my other
| activities. This gives some context for the thoughts.
|
| Now that I migrated to outlines and the notes are much more
| granular, plus I started making more of them--they can often
| serve as a timestamped log of my day. When did I eat the
| breakfast--so I can put the dinner in the stomach before it
| begins an acid-fest? Well, I logged watching an episode of
| the series during the breakfast, so the creation time tells
| me the answer.
|
| I'm scatterbrained, okay. Or rather, the notes are part of my
| 'brain' now.
|
| In fact, I do miss granular times in other logs of my
| activity--ironically, in regard to privacy. I watched a video
| on a particular topic around last summer, and would like to
| find it now--but YT's 'watch history' is crude and just
| leafing through all of it is infeasible. (Actually, perhaps I
| should look into the 'takeout' dumps of activity for the
| timestamps, and make a list of the vids in a better format.)
| highspeedbus wrote:
| Obsidian/Markdown file structure is great for this. It can become
| a standard to "Offline Hypertext" format.
|
| Despite text being fully portable, it is limited when it's needed
| to link a image or other files. People often forget how useful
| this concept is.
|
| Html is not a viable option as it is awfully verbose for taking
| simple a note.
|
| Markdown adds just enough semantics that is perfectly readable.
| From a hex editor to Microsoft Word.
|
| We're in a somewhat critical moment, where markdown can either
| stay as it is, then dominate and become a godsend format of solid
| usability for decades, or a harmful feature is added that would
| slowly drag the whole thing down until the next Just Write Plain
| Text blog post.
| jjice wrote:
| We use Google Docs for pretty much all of our docs since they're
| easy to create, share, and modify, and it works pretty well. I
| just (selfishly) want a good integrated plain text editor as part
| of GSuite. Sharing code via Google Docs isn't great, and
| sometimes I don't want to think about headers and formatting, I
| just want to use tabs to separate my pieces. That said, I'm
| definitely in the minority of users and I'll deal with it, not
| that big of a deal.
| writegit wrote:
| Or both?
|
| I have a daemon that watches for binary changes in writing
| documents.
|
| If changes are identified then it runs: $
| libreoffice --headless --convert-to txt <CHANGED_FILES>
|
| Then commits the plaintext to a git repo.
|
| Allows for diffs, text search, and "longevity" across "authentic"
| docs.
| chaxor wrote:
| I like the idea of making a binary file into a plaintext file -
| but you could store it as the ASCII characters
| "0000110100111011110001111100101..."
|
| This would be great for many reasons. At the top of that list for
| example, is getting a lot more use out of those hard drives you
| paid for.
| happyglands wrote:
| I've struggled with this for quite some time now, and tried
| almost every tool out there. At the moment, I'm settling with
| Bear, writing my notes in Markdown. I prefer the ease of using
| nvAlt but I need the ability to store images and PDFs and I like
| the fact that it has some very nice export options should I
| eventually move to another tool, so I don't feel like I'm "locked
| in".
| [deleted]
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