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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#181

Post by doublerebel »

nategri wrote: post #145
doublerebel wrote: post #67

Plain text: so that no one can own the presentation method. Plain text: so that no one can own the distribution method. Plain text: so that no one can own the creation method. Plain text: so normal people can recover data even when partially corrupted. Plain text: so you aren't forced to see jarring ads. Plain text: so that there are no tracking pixels. Plain text: because connecting information with hyperlinks doesn…

Started with a Stallman-esque rant I could get down with and then ended in a very un-Stallman-esque and opaque ad. :(

Ok fair, this is the first time I've gotten public interest! Awesome. Please hold shortly, website incoming...

(Just for reference, I do want to build a business on open data, but not by owning your data. I would like to help people manage their data.)

EDIT: Website is live! Try https://www.optik.io until DNS catches up, if optik.io is not responding for you.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#183

Post by wruza »

Spooky23 wrote: post #156
wruza wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Unicode already contains directions, smileys, combining marks, why not simply add VGA color plane and few [un]-bold/italic/big/sub/sup markers and forget about these shitty .docs, .htmls, etc? We already have a complex format, why not encapsulate at least simple formatting characters into it? These can be zero-width for rendering on systems that do not support colors. For those who want to point me at html, htm…

As a human, what do I gain from this? Word is probably one of the most successful software products ever devised. There's a reason -- it solves a problem.

We could colorize and format texts via right-click menu in the text box (and even have plugins there like quick syntax highlighting of selection), instead of having to use closed un-interoperable solutions.

Word is succesful, but you can't highlight syntax in Word, apply styles in MD, do WYSIWYG in HTML (cause fonts).

Re: The future of education is plain text

#184

Post by sbierwagen »

doublerebel wrote: post #79
CharlesW wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain text: so when Optik.io melts down immediately from an HN "hug of death" one can use high-availability services instead.

There's nothing to melt down, there is no (public) website there. I can barely get a conversation started on this topic without HN's cynicism, as you demonstrate. But as evidenced by this and other articles, as everyone is getting fed up with the current state of data, people are coming around to the idea.

  There's nothing to melt down
This site can’t be reached

optik.io took too long to respond. Search Google for optik io

ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

Re: The future of education is plain text

#185

Post by sedachv »

FabHK wrote: post #175

One advantage of plain text formats that I haven't seen mentioned is that they're easily and meaningfully diff-able. You can run two versions of a markdown file or a LaTeX source file through a diff, and see what's been changed. Try that with a PDF or Word file or what have you. As I like to keep my files in version control, I use plain text formats as much as possible.

That is an excellent point. I recently switched from Google Docs to Org files with Unison and ediff for syncing. Having everything work offline and on, over multiple machines, and being able to review and merge changes really makes things much more convenient. I now have multiple local and remote backups and no longer have to worry about losing my Google account. Another common pattern is to diff files that come in over email, or to diff when someone takes my code changes and modifies them by hand/rebases them.

At this point I think that plain text files in a distributed version control system that can also import/export patches for emailing (like darcs and git) is clearly superior to cloud-based document storage. The promises of the latter have just not panned out - what we got instead is vendor lock-in and the Damocles sword of account lock-out/deletion/hacking. In many ways (UI responsiveness, control of data and privacy, service discontinuation due to vendor shutting down product/acquisition/bankruptcy, etc), the cloud apps are a big step backward from PC applications.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#186

Post by zlynx »

davidsong wrote: post #44
jancsika wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you represent line breaks?

CRLF unless your audience mostly use Mac or Linux.

It seems to me the only thing on Windows that cares about CRLF is Notepad.

Everything else works fine with just LF. A lot of new Windows software even seems to ship with LF format configuration files. Especially games, probably because it is so common to have a Windows game with Linux backend servers, so the developers are working with both.

So anyway, I'd go with just LF unless your software is Windows only.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#187

Post by taeric »

serhei wrote: post #115
Dangeranger wrote: post #96

Plaintext OrgMode notebooks exhibit every benefit listed in Minimaxir's [0] post, and have the additional advantage of powerful editor integration beyond R code. Here is an example of using the IPython kernel to evaluate inline Python code within an OrgMode document.[1][2] More information on how to create multi-language notebooks with OrgMode Babel here[3] [0] http://minimaxir.com/2017/06/r-notebooks/ [1] http://kit…

Org format is great, but the designs of many of its more advanced features rely heavily on the Emacs editor's ability to collapse metadata. Once you've built a file that uses drawers, tags, some spreadsheets, and several levels of nesting, the resulting file can be too cluttered with metadata to be easily understandable in other plaintext editors.

Meh. Most of the metadata is actually not that hard to understand in source form.

Though, I think this is a valid concern (and I hate that). It is just similar to how people used to have markup in their documents to see what they were typing, but people are lured by anything that hides this markup. See, nobody actually likes typing \bold{hello} instead of just highlighting and bolding. More, people just want the markup to be hidden.

Orgmode shines not because it hides anything. But because it made a very coherent set of macros to type the markup that I want to use. That and source blocks. (Ok, mainly source blocks.)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#188

Post by fao_ »

kbenson wrote: post #75
vog wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? Given the comparatively low quality of Markdown (as a language), isn't GitHub the only reason why Markdown gets pushed so much? If GitHub chose AsciiDoc instead of Markdown as their base, we would be in a better position now.

> Given the comparatively low quality of Markdown (as a language) Markdown stresses ease of readability. I don't find the language low quality at all, just limited. Limited isn't necessarily bad, depending on its purpose. > isn't GitHub the only reason why Markdown gets pushed so much? Reddit's use seems to significantly predate Github, and I would say reaches a far greater audience. Unique users visiting in April 20…

You act as if AsciiDoc is difficult to learn. It seems mostly equivalent to Markdown, just nicer in a lot of small ways

Re: The future of education is plain text

#189

Post by marcosdumay »

dom0 wrote: post #93
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #46

Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: - Notepad - Microsoft Word - PDF - Twiki - Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML - JIRA - Raw HTML - Markdown (several flavors) With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the co…

restructuredtext?

I'm going to second that.

RestructuredText is very powerful, and has an official specification. Basically what Markdown is missing. Yet, it is plain text and easy to parse.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#190

Post by fny »

Pxtl wrote: post #25
krapht wrote: post #2

Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.

This. My wife is a math teacher, and the piss-poor experience of writing mathematical notation outside of MS Word keeps them stuck on Word. As much as she and I love LaTeX's math notation, she can't get her departmentmates onboard with that kind of syntax. They need to maintain notes, guides, tests, quizzes, etc. and basically running a team OneDrive is really the only option because all the alternatives utterly fail…

Then try AsciiMath[0]. It does a fine job of representing math as plain-text, and I find it far more sane than LaTeX for my typical use cases.

LaTeX:

    \begin{bmatrix}
        0 & 1 \\
        1 & 0 \\
    \end{bmatrix}
AsciiMath:

    [[0,1], [1,0]]
[0]: http://asciimath.org/
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