Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
Use FORTRAN.
The future of education is plain text
31–40 of 349 posts
Re: The future of education is plain text
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
False. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...
What does that link intend to prove? The Office Open XML standard relies heavily on hidden implementation details of the Microsoft Office software suite.
"The specification is inadequate to imitate Office" is a different claim from "it only exists as a proprietary, closed format."
Re: The future of education is plain text
#33Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
There are plain text versions for that as well.
Not sure it's so simple. Is LaTeX plain text? Officially it is, but by the same standard so is PostScript or PDF.
Truly the limits are blurry. Even assembly code has an ASCII representation.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#34Re: The future of education is plain text
#35What important problem in this domain does the author think plain text uniquely solves? I'd say that the arguments aren't specific to education, and that they're also pretty weak.
Remember that one of the major breakthroughs of the World Wide Web was that HTML meant documents were no longer plaintext.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that link intend to prove? The Office Open XML standard relies heavily on hidden implementation details of the Microsoft Office software suite.
"The specification is inadequate to imitate Office" is a different claim from "it only exists as a proprietary, closed format."
From what I've heard, the MS Office applications do not even entirely comply with the published specification. So OOXML is still not a definition of the format with which PowerPoint stores its files.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#37What many developers either don't understand or refuse to accept is that when it comes to distribution you don't control formatting. It doesn't matter if that white space is explicit like white space characters or inferred from rules like CSS.
There is a naive assumption that all platforms and operating systems will treat your text (everything is either text or binary before it is parsed into something else) equally. This is false. When when this fallacy becomes self-evident many developers will refuse to modify their assumptions in the belief that consuming software will figure it out properly. Sometimes that is true and sometimes will absolutely break your code/prose/data. Clearly that assumption carries a heavy risk, but this is just data at rest.
When it comes to data moving over a wire the risk substantially increases, because all software that processes that text may make custom modifications along the way. You don't see it so much when the protocol is primitive like HTTP, pub/sub, or RSS (but it still does happen frequently). There are many distribution protocols are that less primitive and absolutely will mutilate the formatting of your documents, such as email (which is why there are email attachments).
Re: The future of education is plain text
#38Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
TeX users would like a word. Of course, that requires learning TeX notation for those reading it without an interpreter.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#39Here we are, 33 years after PostScript was created and now the answer to "education" is plain text... Shouldn't we, as tech sector, feel ashamed for even thinking this might be a good idea?
Re: The future of education is plain text
#40As others have mentioned, once you dig into the innards and nuances of plain text representations and formats, things can get hairy. Still, I think the author is correct in that plain text formats are certainly a better base for sharing curricula, and for knowledge production in general, than something proprietary like word docs, pdfs, etc. I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert…
> I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert into other formats and deliciously human readable are the way to go. I believe that MediaWiki, AsciiDoc or LaTeX are particularily well-suited for this purpose. MediaWiki is already widely known and widely used for knowledge accumulation, namely, in Wikipedia. The downside is, of course, that this wiki language has quite some limitations.…
AsciiDoc has a serious adoption problem compared to MarkDown.