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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#211

Post by TuringTest »

emodendroket wrote: post #99
TuringTest wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So they're just like every other standard on the Web, basically.

Other standards, and web standards in particular, tend to have several open source implementations to guarantee that it's possible to build tools that support it without being the reference implementation. OOXML has no such thing, and the reference implementation is closed source, so it's basically impossible to replicate in any practical sense.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#212

Post by ed312 »

mmphosis wrote: post #117
chaosite wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's UTF-8.

Is it carriage return then linefeed? or just linefeed? or maybe just carriage return? or maybe linefeed then carriage return? or maybe a different character or sequence of characters to denote a newline? I sent someone an important text (7-bit ASCII) file once. Much later, I found that they had tried to read it using NotePad. They had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to format it into something they could re…

The end-of-line character issue is trivial to solve with a very simple editor (e.g. many editors can figure it out and render appropriately). I _think_ the real issue is that NotePad is a rather basic (not dumb, just simple) tool which unfortunately is an OS default. Imagine a world where something like Notepad++ is the default bare-minimum text editor for a typical end-user OS!

Re: The future of education is plain text

#213

Post by doublerebel »

fredsted wrote: post #138
doublerebel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing to melt down, there is no (public) website there. I can barely get a conversation started on this topic without HN's cynicism, as you demonstrate. But as evidenced by this and other articles, as everyone is getting fed up with the current state of data, people are coming around to the idea.

> There's nothing to melt down, there is no (public) website there You might want to be a bit more clear in your communication. When someone links a URL/domain, you'd expect that there's something there. I mean, why not put up a splash page on your domain, telling something about your product (what is it? Something with plain text? A Markdown-based static site generator, maybe? Who knows.), or maybe a form to subscri…

Thanks for your feedback, HN does not pull any punches. I've been pitching this slowly for a while as I honed the product.

I want to help organize data using an open format. I think user control of presentation is crucial as AR and VR work further into daily life -- especially considering accessibility.

Splash page is now up, including the product description, and form to subscribe to a mailing list. Please check it out, I'd love to hear what you think!

https://www.optik.io

Re: The future of education is plain text

#214

Post by [deleted] »

FabHK wrote: post #175

One advantage of plain text formats that I haven't seen mentioned is that they're easily and meaningfully diff-able. You can run two versions of a markdown file or a LaTeX source file through a diff, and see what's been changed. Try that with a PDF or Word file or what have you. As I like to keep my files in version control, I use plain text formats as much as possible.

[deleted]

Re: The future of education is plain text

#215

Post by foobarian »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #46

Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: - Notepad - Microsoft Word - PDF - Twiki - Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML - JIRA - Raw HTML - Markdown (several flavors) With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the co…

I've been writing daily notes in the same text file since 1996. Fascinating to look back through old entries.

Format is dirt simple: date alone on a line is the only special element. The main thing I really miss is the ability to scribble drawings inline.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#216

Post by bo1024 »

paultopia wrote: post #144
Pxtl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. My wife is a math teacher, and the piss-poor experience of writing mathematical notation outside of MS Word keeps them stuck on Word. As much as she and I love LaTeX's math notation, she can't get her departmentmates onboard with that kind of syntax. They need to maintain notes, guides, tests, quizzes, etc. and basically running a team OneDrive is really the only option because all the alternatives utterly fail…

Ugh ugh ugh no. Storytime . A couple years ago, I was in the midst of copyedits on a book with a bunch of math in it. The copyeditors were using a different version of Word. When they sent the edits back to me, the math was gone. Completely. Not only that, but when I tried to copy-paste the math in from a prior draft, the Word file refused to save. Eventually, I had to reconstruct every one of the damn things, by han…

"What You See Is Not What Others Get"

Re: The future of education is plain text

#217

Post by xj9 »

kmicklas wrote: post #205
xj9 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is, but computer isn't smart enough for the future to happen yet

It's the Unix/text fetishizing developers who aren't the smart enough ones I think...

yet it is the unix/text fetish that forms the foundation for toasters, smartphones/watches, clouds, and supercomputers you'd think that a superior alternative would be overtaking this clearly inferior symbolic text system makes you think, don't it? not like people haven't been trying, but why is it so persistent? do you blame the fetish? why can't some other technically superior system win? WHY?

Re: The future of education is plain text

#218

Post by vlasev »

grondilu wrote: post #33
Numberwang wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, plain LaTeX is quite readable, so IMO, it's good enough of a compromise. It does get difficult with a lot of parentheses though.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#219

Post by nobodyorother »

emodendroket wrote: post #201
nobodyorother wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spec isn't actually self-consistent, so it's not clear that it can ever actually be implemented: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080328090328998 http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?stor...

Your source claims the spec contradicts previous adapted ISO standards, not that it contradicts itself (which is what I assume you mean by it not being self-consistent). It does, however, raise the issue of bits like legacy compatibility for Word 97 behavior and scripts not being documented.

Well, no, it is self-inconsistent in places [0]. However, as you mention, those are probably minor points compared to how it contradicts existing standards, like the Gregorian calendar [1], date representation, and language codes.

0: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20070123071154...

1: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20070123071154...

Re: The future of education is plain text

#220

Post by sdenton4 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #46

Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: - Notepad - Microsoft Word - PDF - Twiki - Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML - JIRA - Raw HTML - Markdown (several flavors) With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the co…

hmm..... having seen a bunch of demos of almost-compiling LaTeX produced by neural networks, I wonder if there's a good space for building seq2seq document format converters...
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