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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

#31

Post by mort96 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #30
rmunn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm? UTF-8 encodes all of ASCII with one byte per character, and is pretty efficient for everything else. I think the only advantage UTF-16 has over UTF-8 is that some ranges (such as Han characters I believe?) are often 3 bytes of UTF-8 while they're 2 bytes of UTF-16. Is that your use case? Seems weird to describe that as "all text files" though?

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

#32

Post by thaumasiotes »

mort96 wrote: post #31
thaumasiotes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hm? UTF-8 encodes all of ASCII with one byte per character, and is pretty efficient for everything else. I think the only advantage UTF-16 has over UTF-8 is that some ranges (such as Han characters I believe?) are often 3 bytes of UTF-8 while they're 2 bytes of UTF-16. Is that your use case? Seems weird to describe that as "all text files" though?

UTF-8 encodes European glyphs in two bytes and oriental glyphs in three bytes. This is due to the assumption that you're not going to be using oriental glyphs. If you are going to use them, UTF-8 is a very poor choice.

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

#33

Post by mort96 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #32
mort96 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm? UTF-8 encodes all of ASCII with one byte per character, and is pretty efficient for everything else. I think the only advantage UTF-16 has over UTF-8 is that some ranges (such as Han characters I believe?) are often 3 bytes of UTF-8 while they're 2 bytes of UTF-16. Is that your use case? Seems weird to describe that as "all text files" though?

UTF-8 encodes European glyphs in two bytes and oriental glyphs in three bytes. This is due to the assumption that you're not going to be using oriental glyphs. If you are going to use them, UTF-8 is a very poor choice.

UTF-8 does not encode "European glyphs" in two bytes, no. Most European languages use variations of the latin alphabet, meaning most glyphs in European languages use the 1-byte ASCII subset of UTF-8. The occasional non-ASCII glyph becomes two bytes, that's correct, but that's a much smaller bloat than what you imply.

Anyway, what are you comparing it to, what is your preferred alternative? Do you prefer using code pages so that the bytes in a file have no meaning unless you also supply code page information and you can't mix languages in a text file? Or do you prefer using UTF-16, where all of ASCII is 2 bytes per character but you get a marginal benefit for Han texts?

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

#34

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s

Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse. This is the stuff I grew up with: QBASIC and EDIT.COM for example. Bisqwit has a cool video about how some apps from that era could have a proper mouse cursor, even: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nlNQcKsj74

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

#35

Post by thaumasiotes »

mort96 wrote: post #33
thaumasiotes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UTF-8 encodes European glyphs in two bytes and oriental glyphs in three bytes. This is due to the assumption that you're not going to be using oriental glyphs. If you are going to use them, UTF-8 is a very poor choice.

UTF-8 does not encode "European glyphs" in two bytes, no. Most European languages use variations of the latin alphabet, meaning most glyphs in European languages use the 1-byte ASCII subset of UTF-8. The occasional non-ASCII glyph becomes two bytes, that's correct, but that's a much smaller bloat than what you imply. Anyway, what are you comparing it to, what is your preferred alternative? Do you prefer using code pa…

> Do you prefer using code pages so that the bytes in a file have no meaning unless you also supply code page information?

Yes. Note that this is already how Unicode is supposed to work. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark .

A file isn't meaningful unless you know how to interpret it; that will always be true. Assuming that all files must be in a preexisting format defeats the purpose of having file formats.

> Most European languages use variations of the latin alphabet

If you want to interpret "variations of Latin" really, really loosely, that's true.

Cyrillic and Greek characters get two bytes, even when they are by definition identical to ASCII characters. This bloat is actually worse than the bloat you get by using UTF-8 for Japanese; Cyrillic and Greek will easily fit into one byte.

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

#36

Post by mort96 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #35
mort96 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UTF-8 does not encode "European glyphs" in two bytes, no. Most European languages use variations of the latin alphabet, meaning most glyphs in European languages use the 1-byte ASCII subset of UTF-8. The occasional non-ASCII glyph becomes two bytes, that's correct, but that's a much smaller bloat than what you imply. Anyway, what are you comparing it to, what is your preferred alternative? Do you prefer using code pa…

> Do you prefer using code pages so that the bytes in a file have no meaning unless you also supply code page information? Yes. Note that this is already how Unicode is supposed to work. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark . A file isn't meaningful unless you know how to interpret it; that will always be true. Assuming that all files must be in a preexisting format defeats the purpose of having fil…

UTF-8 does not require a byte order mark. The byte order mark is a technical necessity born from UTF-16 and a desire to store UTF-16 in a machine's native endianness.

The byte order mark has has no relation to code pages.

I don't think you know what you're talking about and I do not think further engagement with you is fruitful. Bye.

EDIT: okay since you edited your comment to add the part about Greek and cryllic after I responded, I'll respond to that too. Notice how I did not say "all European languages". Norwegian, Swedish, French, Danish, Spanish, German, English, Polish, Italian, and many other European languages have writing systems where typical texts are "mostly ASCII with a few special symbols and diacritics here and there". Yes, Greek and cryllic are exceptions. That does not invalidate my point.

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

#37

Post by randomeel »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #22
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 *

That’s cool ! How did you do that ?

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

#38

Post by harmonics »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #35
mort96 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UTF-8 does not encode "European glyphs" in two bytes, no. Most European languages use variations of the latin alphabet, meaning most glyphs in European languages use the 1-byte ASCII subset of UTF-8. The occasional non-ASCII glyph becomes two bytes, that's correct, but that's a much smaller bloat than what you imply. Anyway, what are you comparing it to, what is your preferred alternative? Do you prefer using code pa…

> Do you prefer using code pages so that the bytes in a file have no meaning unless you also supply code page information? Yes. Note that this is already how Unicode is supposed to work. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark . A file isn't meaningful unless you know how to interpret it; that will always be true. Assuming that all files must be in a preexisting format defeats the purpose of having fil…

As someone who has been using Cyrillic writing all my life, I've never noticed this bloat you're speaking of, honestly...

Maybe if you're one of those AI behemots who works with exabytes of training data, it would make some sense to compress it down by less than 50% (since we're using lots of Latin terms and acronyms and punctuation marks which all fit in one byte in UTF-8).

On the web and in other kinds of daily text processing, one poorly compressed image or one JavaScript-heavy webshite obliterates all "savings" you would have had in that week by encoding text in something more efficient.

It's the same with databases. I've never seen anyone pick anything other than UTF-8 in the last 10 years at least, even though 99% of what we store there is in Cyrillic. I sometimes run into old databases, which are usually Oracle, that were set up in the 90s and never really upgraded. The data is in some weird encoding that you haven't heard of for decades, and it's always a pain to integrate with them.

I remember the days of codepages. Seeing broken text was the norm. Technically advanced users would quickly learn to guess the correct text encoding by the shapes of glyphs we would see when opening a file. Do not want.

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

#39

Post by safety1st »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #34

> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse . This is t…

The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for the future.

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

#40

Post by carra »

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 read that article long time ago, and for me it's a hard disagree. A system as complex and quirky as Unicode can never be considered "plain", and even today it is common for many apps that something Unicode-related breaks. ASCII is still the only text system that will really work well everywhere, which I consider a must for calling something plain text.

And yes, ASCII means mostly limiting things to English but for many environments that's almost expected. I would even defend this not being a native English speaker myself.

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