21–30 of 79 posts
Perhaps it needs to be rebranded with a vegetable name, for modern developers to take interest. Samphire, maybe.
No, I don’t think so. Readme pages should be the lowest common denominator to information on the project no matter where you come across it. I think markdown is probably as fancy as it can get and still be readable in the terminal after I clone the repo, or any ide, or the browser. I think of it as a more formatted man page. Would I want a man page to be interactive? Or only work in a browser. I also think if GitHub…
This. Readme files should be readable by anyone. That's one of the promises in the filename (it is readable ;) ). There is a reason readme files are not PDF files.
Are man pages not readable because the original source form is troff?
No. And, by the way, stop with the markdown README crazyness. README files are supposed to be readable as plain text and hard-wrapped at 80 columns. I have found some "readme.md" monstrosities with github-specific markdown that were unreadable outside the github website. This is akin to presenting your readme file as a flash ainmation.
Markdown is still just plain text without any "crazyness". Stuff like "## Header" isn't any more "crazy" than the ASCII art used in many Readme's of old and on top of that doesn't rely on specific monospace fonts or fixed width. And more advanced stuff like hyperlinks or tables are hard to do "right" in text anyway, since it's basically meta data without an objective "right" or "wrong" way of representing it. I also…
No, I don’t think so. Readme pages should be the lowest common denominator to information on the project no matter where you come across it. I think markdown is probably as fancy as it can get and still be readable in the terminal after I clone the repo, or any ide, or the browser. I think of it as a more formatted man page. Would I want a man page to be interactive? Or only work in a browser. I also think if GitHub…
This. Readme files should be readable by anyone. That's one of the promises in the filename (it is readable ;) ). There is a reason readme files are not PDF files.
The times should reflect this evolving need.
No, I don’t think so. Readme pages should be the lowest common denominator to information on the project no matter where you come across it. I think markdown is probably as fancy as it can get and still be readable in the terminal after I clone the repo, or any ide, or the browser. I think of it as a more formatted man page. Would I want a man page to be interactive? Or only work in a browser. I also think if GitHub…
Shouldn't everything only work in a web browser? I'm not sure why documentation hasn't been migrated to containerized microservices deployed on K8s with a React frontend yet. This stuff is all sooo antiquated. /s
Is Ellx open source?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not against markdown per-se, but against markdown readme files that use so much markup (heh) that become unreadable as plain text, no matter your screen size. > Still want 80 columns on your 4k 27" 10bpp HDR monitor? This is offtopic, but a strong YES. There's good reason why on printed books you don't ever see more than about 70 characters per line of text. Long lines are just unreadable, regardless of your font…
> There's good reason why on printed books you don't ever see more than about 70 characters per line of text. That reason is called format not readability, though. Newspapers (if you still remember these) go way beyond this limit and are still readable.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10715...
No. It might be useful for some but it would make it much harder for others I question Unicode as well. A readme file should work as expected in simple text editor. Like an early version of VI from 30 years ago. Anything fancy should be able in the documentation hierarchy for the project
Sorry, but utf-8 is necessary. The world is not USA and some of us exist outside of it, where ascii is gross disregard to conventions. I can agree on plain text readmes, but there is reason that the world moved away from english only encodings and if you want to stay thirty years in the past, this is your choice.
I do not live in America and the country I live in has it's own set of special characters to deal with.
I can perhaps agree that American cultural imperialism in computer science as with many other fields
This post was primarily directed at GitHub. It has users from all over the world.
Having a common Lingua franca for the various public rep is inclusive and productive
I want here there to be a low threshold to use and contribute to my projects.
Lastly, Github is an American company located in the US. With repositories primarily using American created and optimized for Americans keyboard layout programming languages.
Certainly, some programming languages originated in other countries. As far as I can recall they all stick to English for keywords.
A couple of decades ago there was much more variety, and it was more common for countries to have native originated programming languages that did not use English.
Linux started in Finland but it kept the US created standard UNIX names and conventions.
Most if not all documentation is in English many have now been translated to other languages.
With all that in mind. Sticking to the most compatible common denominator is the best standard on Gigahub.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not against markdown per-se, but against markdown readme files that use so much markup (heh) that become unreadable as plain text, no matter your screen size. > Still want 80 columns on your 4k 27" 10bpp HDR monitor? This is offtopic, but a strong YES. There's good reason why on printed books you don't ever see more than about 70 characters per line of text. Long lines are just unreadable, regardless of your font…
> There's good reason why on printed books you don't ever see more than about 70 characters per line of text. That reason is called format not readability, though. Newspapers (if you still remember these) go way beyond this limit and are still readable.
Every so often I open a magazine that doesn't abide by this, and has text that spans across the whole page, and they're nearly unreadable.