31–39 of 39 posts
A love letter to plain text would be a bit more lovely without so much unnecessary formatting (colors, borders, and other embellishments).
Plain text as a storage medium, not as a design element.
Personally I disable most fonts and limit the sizes to improve my browsing experience
Without subtracting anything from the main point on plain text, it sounds like this person is in many senses reinventing the Org file format!
I'm now only using Markdown when I absolutely have to and live in org-mode for everything else. And I've only just began scratching the surface of org's features!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Encodings do not make text a binary format. This pedantry is uncalled for.
I’m not sure the text/binary distinction is that useful. ASCII is much simpler than Unicode encodings, to the point where text can even become an attack vector. A fully featured UTF-8 parsing and rendering engine is a sophisticated thing. Does it matter whether one or the other is classified as text or binary? Not as much as it matters which requires the more complex code to process.
Encoding a number in binary takes 4 or 8 bytes. Encoding it in plain text (ASCII or Unicode) takes as many bytes as there are digits, plus one for the sign / decimal separator. If you're talking about ASCII/Unicode, you're not talking about text/binary.
> ASCII is much simpler than Unicode encodings
I don't disagree with you, but Unicode is not binary.
> Does it matter whether one or the other is classified as text or binary?
They're both text.
As a side note: I find it amazing how many private pictures the author is sharing on his public Flickr album, which is linked on the website.
A love letter to plain text would be a bit more lovely without so much unnecessary formatting (colors, borders, and other embellishments).
Ageed! It was too painful to read on my phone. Dark red on black is a questionable design choice. I appreciate the desire to standout, but usability should trump style.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Encodings do not make text a binary format. This pedantry is uncalled for.
I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. I also think that plain text is a bad idea, binary files are much easier to parse.
And I'm just saying it's pedantry. 'plain text' is an umbrella term for 'not binary'.
> I also think that plain text is a bad idea, binary files are much easier to parse.
Binary files are definitely faster and more compact. And tools such as google protocol buffers makes passing information very convenient and efficient. Unfortunately, most APIs out there use JSON, so we just have to live with it.
Maybe the widespread adoption of JSON and plain text APIs is a reflection of how we, as developers, have become more likely to optimize for our own development process rather than the actual hardware (see all the electron craze).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. And yet, everyone agrees there is, and has no problem telling its case from other formats, even if they're all 0s and 1s underneath.
American programmers with little exposure to the world beyond their personal milieu agree that there is. The rest of the world stringently disagrees.
Still, missing the point.
The difference between plain text formats and binary formats is not that plain text files do no consist of bytes or don't need an encoding to read them.
It's being able to work on them with a plain text editor, and being based on actual written text -- as opposed to packed bytes and custom (proprietary or not) formats.
What is 'plain text' ? Is it ASCII ? 7 or 8 bit ? EBCDIC ? UTF-8 ?
Whoa that's an ugly webpage. It's so huge!