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The Art of Plain Text (2015)

netmeister.org

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Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#21

Post by yumiris »

Complexity of storage/presentation formats can indeed compromise accessibility and longevity. However, trying to enforce plain text on everything can be detrimental to the quality and fidelity of information.

Of course, it very much depends on the context - technical documents may not need images as much as a travelling blog would. That's why it's important to use plain text as necessary, rather than always. The same applies to any format, including images and even videos. It's about balancing the usage of different formats, plain text included.

With this in mind, it's certainly recommended to start with plain text, but if plain text doesn't cut it, it's much more practical (and beneficial for the information) to just add an image. Ideally, one should always diversify how they store and present a piece of information, if they can afford to do so.

There is a tragic irony in sacrificing the potential fidelity of information in hopes of making it universally accessible.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#22

Post by throw0101a »

remram wrote: post #14
every wrote: post #12

128 character US-ASCII is indeed fundamental. It is an almost verbatim translation from the teletypewriter command set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

In the United States, maybe. In most places requiring ASCII is an arbitrary middle finger. Most of us have encountered the "please enter a valid name " after filling in a form.

Plenty of cultures are myopic: I know some folks who lived in Korea for a while who would complain about web sites that only allowed four characters. Most family names are 1-2 Hangul characters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_surnames

And most given names are 1-2 Hangul characters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Korean_given_names

Why would ever need more? /s

My pet peeve is sites not accepting e-mail addresses with sub-addressing, i.e., the "tag" in foo+tag@example.com.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#23

Post by every »

remram wrote: post #14
every wrote: post #12

128 character US-ASCII is indeed fundamental. It is an almost verbatim translation from the teletypewriter command set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

In the United States, maybe. In most places requiring ASCII is an arbitrary middle finger. Most of us have encountered the "please enter a valid name " after filling in a form.

US-ASCII predates the internet, UNIX, WWW and almost anything else you currently use. While seminal, it was certainly not prescient. Now it is little more than a fun artifact to play around with: https://every.sdf.org/

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#24

Post by giantrobot »

tomxor wrote: post #9
pipeline_peak wrote: post #4

Kind of ironic how an article that praises plaintext shows up as absolute garbage on my iPhone with or without reader mode.

Read the source for plain text mode, not HTML: view-source:https://www.netmeister.org/blog/the-art-of-plain-text.html The page hasn't yet had the necessary viewport metatag added to prevent mobile browsers doing arbitrary and selective auto adjustments to the font sizes in an attempt to make it "better". (I presume this is what you are talking about - I don't do phones, grumble grumble :wq)

Or mobile browsers just set a viewport width of 960px if no viewport settings are specified. This is a sane assumption since if a viewport width isn't explicitly set the page was probably designed for desktops.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#25

Post by throw453566 »

smitty1e wrote: post #5

> Resist the temptation to use images. If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem. Not to diminish a great point, but there is no shame in a simple table or diagram, either. Indeed, given the ambiguities of written language, doubling down on an important point with a graphic or chart reinforces that point and can help broaden the audience…

> If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem.

This definitely depends on the situation. Whenever we do QA tests, it's much more effective to just take a screenshot or video of the problem rather than wasting time trying to explain it in text.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#26

Post by mmwelt »

every wrote: post #12

128 character US-ASCII is indeed fundamental. It is an almost verbatim translation from the teletypewriter command set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

What's wrong with using UTF-8? Disregarding that I may want to write documents in a language that needs non-ASCII characters, I may want to use names of people or places that use non-ASCII characters.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#27

Post by hatmatrix »

goosedragons wrote: post #8
nextos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

org-mode has very nice bulleting and indenting facilities, as it descends from outline-mode. I imagine other plain text outliners might have equivalent features. It also has good literate programming support so that you can run code from a plaintext file, which may also contain comments and capture the code output. I don't use this much, though. I prefer the usual model of programs split into files. I got addicted to…

Org mode also let's you tangle your code chunks into separate files. And you can specify different files (or the same) for different chunks so you can kinda have programs split into files while doing everything in org. I really like this feature, I used to use Knitr but I don't think it's possible to tangle different chunks to different files.

Org-babel is a treasure and I much prefer it to Jupyter.

However, while org-babel is feature-rich in obscure ways that I constantly discover, it's still missing some out-of-the-box convenience like automated figure management and running multiple code blocks (like running code blocks to the middle of the page - not all the way through).

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#28

Post by remram »

every wrote: post #23
remram wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the United States, maybe. In most places requiring ASCII is an arbitrary middle finger. Most of us have encountered the "please enter a valid name " after filling in a form.

US-ASCII predates the internet, UNIX, WWW and almost anything else you currently use. While seminal, it was certainly not prescient. Now it is little more than a fun artifact to play around with: https://every.sdf.org/

US-ASCII predates those things in the US. In most other places, different alphabets predated ASCII, and indeed the US. Sort-of-old is no argument for quality or fitness for every purpose.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#29

Post by tomxor »

throw0101a wrote: post #19
tomxor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the source for plain text mode, not HTML: view-source:https://www.netmeister.org/blog/the-art-of-plain-text.html The page hasn't yet had the necessary viewport metatag added to prevent mobile browsers doing arbitrary and selective auto adjustments to the font sizes in an attempt to make it "better". (I presume this is what you are talking about - I don't do phones, grumble grumble :wq)

Wrapping everything in a pre block isn't necessary. For example, look at Daring Fireball : [1][2] which is nicely rendered in a web browser, and very simple when you do a View Source. [1] https://daringfireball.net [2] https://daringfireball.net/2022/02/on_the_origin_of_the_ipho...

It's not bad, but I prefer netmeister's.

> Wrapping everything in a pre block isn't necessary.

I'm not saying it has to be all or nothing... but I don't see the point in not wrapping in a pre block or equivalent, having a mix is fine, i.e using an anchor or some and tags if you want sure, but if you are going to insert a bunch of LFs in there anyway for your column width, why not also use them for paragraphs separation, it just seems odd to me to use

instead and to clutter the source.

You can have HTML inside pre, and you can have as much or little as you want.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#30

Post by every »

remram wrote: post #28
every wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US-ASCII predates the internet, UNIX, WWW and almost anything else you currently use. While seminal, it was certainly not prescient. Now it is little more than a fun artifact to play around with: https://every.sdf.org/

US-ASCII predates those things in the US . In most other places, different alphabets predated ASCII, and indeed the US. Sort-of-old is no argument for quality or fitness for every purpose.

This is not about alphabets or character sets. It is about the first standardized computer-to-computer textual protocol. And that is US-ASCII. That it is all skewed to US characters is a derivative of where it was initially developed. But not to worry, zillions of other code pages for every language on the planet soon appeared, and yours probably included...
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