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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#331

Post by accordionclown »

kbenson wrote: post #330
accordionclown wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gruber's brain-dead version _has_ been replaced. by better versions. the problem is these "better versions" are all inconsistent with each other. and each of them has an installed base which insists that the egg be cracked on their preferred end. if instead of adopting markdown, people would have extracted a small subset of asciidoc (which predated markdown) or restructured-text (which also predated markdown) to serv…

> gruber's brain-dead version _has_ been replaced. by better versions. the problem is these "better versions" are all inconsistent with each other. They are all mostly consistent with the core markdown. They are inconsistent in their extensions. Markdown itself does have problems in that there was no formal spec, but that's mostly been resolved with CommonMark[1]. They even go so far as to document the different exte…

> They are all mostly consistent with the core markdown.

it's fairly easy to get the brain-dead part "right". even down to replicating gruber's original bugs and his corner-case complications.

> They are inconsistent in their extensions.

that's precisely my point. and the crux of the problem.

> Markdown was meant to codify already in use norms

markdown's markup did not differ significantly from that of asciidoc or restructured-text. all of them, including setext, leveraged existing conventions from e-mail and usenet.

> and to emphasize readability over all else

since nobody is meant to actually _read_ raw markdown, i've never understood why everyone cites that passage so religiously, other than that is part of the origin story mythology.

> I think that's highly simplistic, and ignores the realities.

due mostly to netnewswire, which installed gruber as its default mac-blogger, gruber's reach was phenomenal when blogging first went viral. if you don't understand the power of that reach at that time, it's probably because you weren't around. and that group of "cool internet kids" still flaunts itself, most notably recently in the nearly-immediate widespread uptake of json-feed.

the _only_ reason markdown was the choice of the masses was because it looked "easier" to a lazy tl;dr mentality. which is a false economy for which the light-markup revolution will have to continue to pay for years down the line.

well, that coupled with the fact that markdown has a catchy name. one cannot deny that. that helped too.

at any rate, kbenson, i'm off to a school reunion, so the last move here will be yours, if you choose to make it. we've hit the point of severely diminished returns anyway.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#335

Post by u801e »

lyra_comms wrote: post #91
lyra_comms wrote: post #88

We believe the future of online conversation is plain text, too. www.hellolyra.com

For example, the first-line paragraph indent - which evolved over centuries to guide the eye, ergonomically and aesthetically - is missing from the modern Web. Lyra brings it back.

> For example, the first-line paragraph indent - which evolved over centuries to guide the eye, ergonomically and aesthetically - is missing from the modern Web

I wonder whether the indent really has any advantage over the blank line separation between paragraphs of text.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#336

Post by FabHK »

tincholio wrote: post #292
mrweasel wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People look at you like your a damn wizard when you diff two texts to find the differences. I'm sure there are diff tools for Word as well, but almost no one use them, because they aren't aware that such a tool could exist. The average person run around with a smart phone in their pocket, a marvel of engineering and yet they still don't know how to use their computer to do trivial tasks.

If anything, the "track changes" feature in Word is actually nicer than diffing by hand (and this is coming from someone who positively hates Word!).

Does it track changes in one document (when enabled), or can you give it two documents and let it highlight changes?

(A fairly common occurrence when many people's distributed version control system consists of emailing around "thesis_v0.9.doc", "thesis_v1.0.doc", "thesis_final.doc", "thesis_final_v2.doc", etc. See also: http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1531 )

Re: The future of education is plain text

#337

Post by u801e »

yellowapple wrote: post #294

The only downside I can think of here is that plain-text-only documents tend to defer images/figures and other non-plain-text media to external files (if they even support such media in the first place). This means that these additional files (and their formats) need to be considered as well. After all, not all of us are able to learn by just reading a bunch of text. Some of us need graphical (possibly video) or even…

> The only downside I can think of here is that plain-text-only documents tend to defer images/figures and other non-plain-text media to external files (if they even support such media in the first place). This means that these additional files (and their formats) need to be considered as well.

Before MIME was a thing,I was possible to embed images in emails by including a block of uuencoded text in the middle of the email message (which was otherwise in plain text).

I suppose that could be one option assuming the client program can render them.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#338

Post by kbenson »

accordionclown wrote: post #331
kbenson wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gruber's brain-dead version _has_ been replaced. by better versions. the problem is these "better versions" are all inconsistent with each other. They are all mostly consistent with the core markdown. They are inconsistent in their extensions. Markdown itself does have problems in that there was no formal spec, but that's mostly been resolved with CommonMark[1]. They even go so far as to document the different exte…

> They are all mostly consistent with the core markdown. it's fairly easy to get the brain-dead part "right". even down to replicating gruber's original bugs and his corner-case complications. > They are inconsistent in their extensions. that's precisely my point. and the crux of the problem. > Markdown was meant to codify already in use norms markdown's markup did not differ significantly from that of asciidoc or re…

> since nobody is meant to actually _read_ raw markdown, i've never understood why everyone cites that passage so religiously, other than that is part of the origin story mythology.

Because that's not a universal feel, and some people do read it. I write a subset of markdown normally in text. I use asterisks for bold, use a hash for section headings, and use unordered and ordered lists as defined. I value that I write the same thing, and sometimes it's just text and sometimes it gets prettified, and I really don't need to care the majority of the time whether it does or not, because for the most part people understand the conventions used in the plain text.

Here's the kicker, in one job I designed a system to send email to customers that took advantage of this, and if you supplied a text message to email and the markdown version was different, automatically generated a multi-part email with the plain text part being the markdown, and the HTML part being the generated output from the markdown.

> due mostly to netnewswire, which installed gruber as its default mac-blogger, gruber's reach was phenomenal when blogging first went viral. if you don't understand the power of that reach at that time, it's probably because you weren't around. and that group of "cool internet kids" still flaunts itself, most notably recently in the nearly-immediate widespread uptake of json-feed.

I think you vastly overestimate the pull Gruber had over the general people at that time. I didn't know anything about him, but it wasn't because I wasn't around, I was already working in the industry. It was because I didn't have anything to do with Apple products and didn't care. Which is the same for most people. We're talking about three years pre-iphone here. Before the unibody macbook. Apple's core product that was tapping a wider audience was the iPod. If you weren't following Apple as a customer and fan, chances are you didn't know or care who Gruber was. I certainly didn't.

But Gruber wasn't the only author. Arron Schwartz invented it with him, and Aaron Schwartz was helping out an early Reddit a year later. Again, I think you vastly overestimate Gruber's role over actual use in popular sites, such as Reddit, and later Stack Overflow.

> well, that coupled with the fact that markdown has a catchy name. one cannot deny that. that helped too.

I won't deny that at all! I think that probably has more to do with it than Gruber's advocacy as well. :)

> at any rate, kbenson, i'm off to a school reunion

Enjoy! I've got another year before I have my 20th.

> we've hit the point of severely diminished returns anyway.

Agreed. We're really just refining our prior points but not making any headway in persuading each other.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#339

Post by tannhaeuser »

mrec wrote: post #323
tannhaeuser wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parsing semistructured text as markup is a problem solved over 30 years ago [1]. SGML has the SHORTREF feature which allows custom Wiki syntaxes such as markdown, but also casual math. It works by applying a context-dependent (parent element dependent) mapping of tokens (such as the `_` token for markdown emphasis) to replacement text (eg. the ` ` start-element tag). Within the ` ` context, the `_` token is mapped to…

We may be talking about different things. Parsing valid, standard-conforming HTML/Markdown/whatever is a solved problem. Getting multiple parsers to deal with arbitrary tag soup, authoring errors, variously-supported extensions etc in a consistent way is a lot uglier. The problems may be commercial/political/educational/organizational rather than technical, but that doesn't mean they aren't real.

I'd say that's exactly what SGML is about - a meta language to describe those things consistently.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#340

Post by dredmorbius »

accordionclown wrote: post #299
dredmorbius wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a sufficient device it's actually a fairly decent format. The problem is that that device has to relatively closely correspond to printed paper sizes, within a factor of about 75% - 125%. What PDF offers is a consistent, space-persistent, formatted output. For reading longer works, it actually does matter to me where a passage appears on a page, or within a work. Spatial memory is important that way. I read a l…

dr. ed said: > If I'm extracting content from works, I prefer source (LaTeX, Markdown, DocBook, etc.). Though that's another story. except it's not actually another story. it's just a different part of the same story. and a format (like .pdf) which only handles one part of the story well (such as reading) but falls apart on another part (like text reuse) is not -- ultimately -- a good solution. but that doesn't mean…

As you note: if PDF is what you want, then the option to request it, or whatever other format is your preferred option, would be excellent user-centric behaviour.

The idea of requesting, say, ., where extension is [html,pdf,epub,djvu,txt,json,tex,md,csv,dir,...] would be interesting.

This presumes that there's a way to represent the content as, say, a directory listing, CSV, or JSON archive.

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