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Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

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Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#21

Post by dwb »

adityaathalye wrote: post #19
dwb wrote: post #17

Plain text is great as far as it goes, but when it comes to structure you start from zero for every file. There’s always someone getting wistful about ad-hoc combinations of venerable Unix tools to process “plain text”, and that’s fine when you’re in an ad-hoc situation, but it’s no substitute for a well-specified format.

XML, JSON, YAML, RDF, EDN, LaTeX, OrgMode, Markdown... Plenty of plaintext, but structured information formats that are "yes, and". Yes, I can process them as lines of plain text, and I can do structured data transformations on them too, and there are clients (or readers) that know how to render them in WYSIWYG style.

If that’s our definition of “plain text”, sure. I would still rather our tools were more advanced, such that printable and non-printable formats were on a more equal footing, though. I always process structured formats through something that understands the structure, if I can, so I feel that the only benefit I regularly get out of formats being printable is that I have to use tools that only cope with printable formats. The argument starts getting a bit circular for me.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#22

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

Joel11 wrote: post #20

It's good to see the plain text, it's been a while that people wanting them. So many users wants the Special fonts but in here simple is Special to eyes and Mind. As a developer I agree. Sometimes simplicity is more Special and powerful than complex formats.

* L a u g h s i n u t f 1 6 *

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#24

Post by 2b3a51 »

Tangent to article: text character based charts for statistics. Decades ago I had an education version of MINITAB that ran under DOS and did scatter diagrams and dotplots and box and whisker plots from text characters (you could use pure text, I think proper ASCII or you could set an option to use those DOS drawing characters). The idea was to encourage initial data exploration before launching on formal statistical tests.

Anyone know of a terminal program that can do proper dotplots?

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#25

Post by lelanthran »

ssivark wrote: post #5

Couldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)... Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)

I can't tell what the argument is just from the slideshow. The main point appears to be that code pages, UTF-16, etc are all "plain text" but not really.

If that really was the argument, then it is, in 2026, obsolete; utf-8 is everywhere.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#27

Post by benj111 »

lelanthran wrote: post #25
ssivark wrote: post #5

Couldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)... Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)

I can't tell what the argument is just from the slideshow. The main point appears to be that code pages, UTF-16, etc are all "plain text" but not really. If that really was the argument, then it is, in 2026, obsolete; utf-8 is everywhere.

He has a YouTube channel, there's a talk on there.

He also discusses code pages etc.

I don't think the thesis is wrong. Eg when I think plain text I think ASCII, so we're already disagreeing about what 'plain text' is. His point isn't that we don't have a standard, it's that we've had multiple standards over what we think is the most basic of formats, with lots of hidden complications.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#28

Post by benj111 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #9
dlcarrier wrote: post #7

From the title, I was not expecting a bunch of extended ASCII characters.

The article mentioned that the use of 'ASCII' within the context of those tools should not be seen as the limited character set ASCII. Personally, I would avoid mentioning ASCII at all. The title just talks of plain text though, and plain text usually means UTF-8 encoded text these days. Plain, as in conventional, standardised, portable, and editable with any text editor. I would be surprised if someone talked about…

I would?

Would an emoji count as plain text?

What about right to left text? I have no idea how many editors handle that.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#30

Post by thaumasiotes »

rmunn wrote: post #15
ssivark wrote: post #5

Couldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)... Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)

Haven't watched the videos yet, but from the slides, it looks like part of the issue he was talking about was encodings (there's a slide illustrating UTF-16LE ve UTF-16BE, for example). Thankfully, with UTF-8 becoming the default everywhere (so that you need a really good reason not to use it for any given document), we're back at "yes, there is such a thing as plain text" again. It has a much larger set of valid cha…

> Thankfully, with UTF-8 becoming the default everywhere (so that you need a really good reason not to use it for any given document), we're back at "yes, there is such a thing as plain text" again.

Whenever I hear this, I hear "all text files should be 50% larger for no reason".

UTF-8 is pretty similar to the old code page system.

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