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Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

blog.miris.design

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Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#41

Post by InitialLastName »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #20

This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is wrestling with. The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's where it gets interesting. I used to set my students a question about information content in a class on the philosophy of procedural representation. W…

It would be interesting to compare the video and the photo to a similarly-sized excerpt of her writing.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#42

Post by aposm »

aasasd wrote: post #27
nonrandomstring wrote: post #20

This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is wrestling with. The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's where it gets interesting. I used to set my students a question about information content in a class on the philosophy of procedural representation. W…

> very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart I thought photo quality was rather meh until the 50s or at least the 40s? Even with large films the results are often muddy in olden shots—while 70 mm movie film from the 60s will probably still be redigitized into super-duper-hd formats in the late 21st century (e.g. https://youtu.be/sCv-dIFGcd0 ).

This is not quite correct... For motion picture film, yes, anything older than the 70mm film you're talking about tends to be low-resolution because of the physical constraints of moving a foot or more of film through a camera each second. However, still photos from that era were much better - the limitations of film stocks were lighting, and with enough light to gather, a large format photo could be extremely sharp and high-resolution (if that was the priority). It sounds like this is referring to a formal portrait setting, with potentially very bright studio lighting and high quality film, so it could easily be sharper than all but very recent digital cameras (as large-format film still is).

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#43

Post by deltarholamda »

dhosek wrote: post #39
llarsson wrote: post #8

That "some" proprietary formats from the 80's and 90's are still readable is already causing real problems: because not *all* are. So text, possibly with Markdown or similar hints regarding emphasis and structure, is still vastly better than any alternative I can think of.

I bumped into this recently with a couple Kodak PhotoCDs I uncovered last month. Trying to get the pictures out of the PCD files is turning out to be more challenging than I expected.

Is ImageMagick not doing the job? It's been a while, but Photoshop used to be pretty adept at this as well.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#44

Post by deltarholamda »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #20

This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is wrestling with. The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's where it gets interesting. I used to set my students a question about information content in a class on the philosophy of procedural representation. W…

I get what the author is trying to say, and I certainly agree. Sometimes you simply need it to look a certain way or use an image that cannot be summarized in text in a meaningful way in order to get your point across.

All those monks slaving away doing doodles in the margins weren't just staving off carpal tunnel. There's meaning there you can't get any other way. Before Man could write, Man made art.

The other HN article about "plaintext only" I also agree with. HTML is the synthesis of the two. Sometimes I forget what a great idea and a blessing HTML is. Even if you don't have a browser that can render it, reading an HTML document isn't difficult if it isn't festooned with auto-generated nonsense.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#45

Post by eatmygodetia »

I feel like a lot of use plain text proponents forget that outside of ASCII and now UTF-8, lots of alleged plain text documents with diacritics or non-latin characters are at least slightly difficult to open because of their somewhat esoteric encodings. Plain text isn't as universal as it is often claimed, although it is immensely simpler than some other formats.

But maybe we should all use monochrome bitmap files for everything? That would be very simple.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#46

Post by js2 »

dhosek wrote: post #39
llarsson wrote: post #8

That "some" proprietary formats from the 80's and 90's are still readable is already causing real problems: because not *all* are. So text, possibly with Markdown or similar hints regarding emphasis and structure, is still vastly better than any alternative I can think of.

I bumped into this recently with a couple Kodak PhotoCDs I uncovered last month. Trying to get the pictures out of the PCD files is turning out to be more challenging than I expected.

I converted mine years ago using iPhoto but according to Wikipedia, there are several programs that can do the conversion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_CD#Converting_Photo_CD_i...

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#47

Post by mro_name »

dhosek wrote: post #39
llarsson wrote: post #8

That "some" proprietary formats from the 80's and 90's are still readable is already causing real problems: because not *all* are. So text, possibly with Markdown or similar hints regarding emphasis and structure, is still vastly better than any alternative I can think of.

I bumped into this recently with a couple Kodak PhotoCDs I uncovered last month. Trying to get the pictures out of the PCD files is turning out to be more challenging than I expected.

what was the issue - hardware access (a CD reader), bit rot or else?

The image format was jpeg if I remember correctly, wasn't it?

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#48

Post by mro_name »

alanbernstein wrote: post #18
ciphol wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the "pro plain text" link posted earlier used lots of formatting. I don't see why pure plain text is better in any way than plain text with formatting, like a simplified form of HTML ( , , , some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text. Images have their own value, as do animations and video on occasion. Here matters bec…

As the pro-plain-text post said: HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.

No, not when it comes to what reading person they target.

Here text/plain is the only that works for e.g. my mother.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#49

Post by causi »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #20

This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is wrestling with. The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's where it gets interesting. I used to set my students a question about information content in a class on the philosophy of procedural representation. W…

one might say that a great poet using only a few words might capture a landscape better than a painting, but if our culture drifts toward a visual one where poetry is no longer understood we cannot say that the medium itself degraded.

That has little to do with the medium. If the painter takes as much effort as the poet, and the viewer as much time and effort as the reader, just as much information and emotion can be gleaned from the painting as the poem.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#50

Post by mro_name »

b112 wrote: post #30
ciphol wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the "pro plain text" link posted earlier used lots of formatting. I don't see why pure plain text is better in any way than plain text with formatting, like a simplified form of HTML ( , , , some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text. Images have their own value, as do animations and video on occasion. Here matters bec…

like a simplified form of HTML ( , , , some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text. Yes, but, the problem isn't typically being proprietary, when it comes to future use, but a closed, non standard, unknown format. Yet you're creating a new standard here, with your own rules, which no one will understand, and which no automated tool…

> no one will understand

that's a bit harsh.

And frankly, I don't understand 100% english either, but still we use it to communicate.

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