The Art of Plain Text (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#41

Post by afc » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:14 AM UTC

glacials wrote: post #40

> 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. This is really hard to agree with. There are some things text just isn’t good for, like sheet music or color theory. There are also many readers and authors for whom big chunks of text are hard to digest.

I agree with you, that claim also gave me pause. And image can be worth more than a thousand words; taking that proverb at face value, it's hard to argue that you should spend the thousand words when an image would convey the same information much more efficiently.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#42

Post by afc » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:21 AM UTC

emteycz wrote: post #39

greenyoda wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even languages that use the Latin alphabet, but with various accent marks, such as German, French, Spanish, etc.

These languages have developed ways to cope because of SMS.

German somewhat has (e.g., you write "ue" instead of "ü", "ss" for "ß", as in "suess"), but Spanish certainly hasn't. Saying that Spanish can be written in us-ascii is about the same as saying that English could cope if you removed the h and the y — it would still be understandable, right? Us-ascii Spanish "?d'onde est'a la biblioteca?" is as pleasant as, uh, "w^ere is t^e librarv?"

I agree with most of this article but, as a Spanish, German and Italian speaker, you can bet I'll refuse to write in an unnecessarily crippled and incorrect version of these languages; I'm very grateful for Unicode.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#43

Post by opunsoars » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:24 AM UTC

glacials wrote: post #40

> 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. This is really hard to agree with. There are some things text just isn’t good for, like sheet music or color theory. There are also many readers and authors for whom big chunks of text are hard to digest.

A picture is worth a thousand words and all that. I guess we need more schematics and images to communicate disambiguously. What if you are writing 1000 words of plain text to explain a workflow but has zero images? That is just bending backwards to fit in with the plain text rule

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#44

Post by emteycz » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:25 AM UTC

afc wrote: post #42

emteycz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These languages have developed ways to cope because of SMS.

German somewhat has (e.g., you write "ue" instead of "ü", "ss" for "ß", as in "suess"), but Spanish certainly hasn't. Saying that Spanish can be written in us-ascii is about the same as saying that English could cope if you removed the h and the y — it would still be understandable, right? Us-ascii Spanish "?d'onde est'a la biblioteca?" is as pleasant as, uh, "w^ere is t^e librarv?" I agree with most of this article…

Don't get me wrong, I think these languages shouldn't be crippled too.

However, I also think that contexts such as system log messages should be in English.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#45

Post by dspillett » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:39 AM UTC

jart wrote: post #7

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.

Page scores a 100 on lighthouse. https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.netme... Although search engines probably won't show this page to mobile users because it doesn't have that meta viewport tag. Also I'm not a mod but welcome to the community https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I doubt the author is reading but I've had people analyze and talk about every detail of my html when submit…

> but I've had people analyze and talk about every detail of my html when submitting hobby projects

Take it as an unintended complement: if all they can find wrong is little niggles then you core idea must be good & interesting.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#46

Post by hnlmorg » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:00 AM UTC

emptyparadise wrote: post #34

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor. What if I speak Chinese?

The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places. Not saying I agree with their statement though because even in 2015 it was obvious Unicode was here to stay. But I can at least understand their sentiment. If that were written now I’d wager it would say Unicode rather than ASCII. Or at least I’d really hope it would.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#47

Post by mmwelt » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:00 AM UTC

emptyparadise wrote: post #34

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor. What if I speak Chinese?

Quite so. Much of what the article says is interesting, but nowadays, I'd say using UTF-8 would be more reasonable.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#48

Post by minimilian » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:06 AM UTC

> The two most important ways to make your text easy to read are a short line-length and the copious use of paragraphs.

Where does this so broadly embraced idea, that two sentences qualify as a ``paragraph'', come from; and is there any evidence that writing in this way achieves anything beyond suggesting that the reader (as well as the writer) is illiterate?

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#49

Post by dusted » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:14 AM UTC

I was on board until "Use only plain ASCII text"

Not all languages lend themselves to the ASCII character set.

and

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

Oh, that must be why IC datasheets have those pesky timing diagrams and pinouts, the designers didn't fully understand the problem.

It is strange to see the author put so much weight on readability and comprehension in one paragraph, and then a few later, suggest that we chose deliberately NOT to use the right symbols (letters, mathematical notation, etc) and NOT to images to explain things that lend themselves to images.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#50

Post by kkfx » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 9:19 AM UTC

emteycz wrote: post #44

afc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German somewhat has (e.g., you write "ue" instead of "ü", "ss" for "ß", as in "suess"), but Spanish certainly hasn't. Saying that Spanish can be written in us-ascii is about the same as saying that English could cope if you removed the h and the y — it would still be understandable, right? Us-ascii Spanish "?d'onde est'a la biblioteca?" is as pleasant as, uh, "w^ere is t^e librarv?" I agree with most of this article…

Don't get me wrong, I think these languages shouldn't be crippled too. However, I also think that contexts such as system log messages should be in English.

Why not in Greek? Why not in Serbian (with Cyrillic alphabet)? Why not in Hangul (South Korea)? Why not in Japanese (in all their three alphabets)?

If you want an easy international language, that's why we (humans) invented many years ago the concept of international auxiliary languages, Esperanto as the oldest/most known but various others exists. That's the SOLE way to have their own mother language and a secondary language for "any nation" that does not give advantages to any nation (so far English is the global language just because they were the winner of the last big world war, before was French etc) and so can be accepted by anyone.

Remember the principle of communicating vessels, no matter the present global situation, if it's not egalitarian than sooner or later will be weaponized and things change. If really neutral and useful it might survive. The Swiss choose Latin as a symbolical neutral language, we might do something better for something less symbolic but much more important in practice...