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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)

#71

Post by b112 »

mro_name wrote: post #50
b112 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point isn't that you can learn it, but instead, having to learn it by examining it in depth, always wondering if there are things not used yet (does the doc you look at, only show part of the standard in its formatting? Imagine a doc not using a tag, but the tag is in other docs...), and then, writing code to covert it.

Standards exist for a reason.

We already have issues with people not understanding specs, and writing data out of spec, even with that spec in RFC's!

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

#72

Post by jjice »

We use Google Docs for pretty much all of our docs since they're easy to create, share, and modify, and it works pretty well. I just (selfishly) want a good integrated plain text editor as part of GSuite. Sharing code via Google Docs isn't great, and sometimes I don't want to think about headers and formatting, I just want to use tabs to separate my pieces. That said, I'm definitely in the minority of users and I'll deal with it, not that big of a deal.

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

#73

Post by pdonis »

Zak wrote: post #69
thomascgalvin wrote: post #56

This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more pedantic than I think it needs to be. I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand. The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible." Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you…

It's a response to this, which does advocate the use of literal plain text files where possible: https://sive.rs/plaintext The author mentions converting to other open, text-based formats like HTML and LaTeX for publishing and writes: > Keep your graphics files alongside your text files. But keep your text as plain text.

> It's a response to this

Seems more like a misunderstanding of it than a response. As you quote explicitly from the Sivers article, he is talking about keeping text as plain text, not about keeping images as plain text. And the Miris article is basically saying the same thing (at the end he even says plain text is still his first choice), yet appears to think he's giving some kind of opposing viewpoint.

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

#74

Post by mark-r »

raman162 wrote: post #66
thomascgalvin wrote: post #56

This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more pedantic than I think it needs to be. I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand. The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible." Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you…

I got the same feeling as well. Open formats and avoiding proprietary lock-in is what the spirit of "write in plain text" is about.

I took a different conclusion from the plain text article. The argument isn't about open formats, it's really about plain text, simply because there's no need to have a tool to make use of it. Even open formats can get abandoned and become unusable.

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

#75

Post by titzer »

> What ultimately matters is that information is captured and preserved as thoroughly as possible. Between a picture that expresses a thousand words, and plain text file that sacrifices its detail and authenticity, why wouldn't we choose the former? Indeed, this question applies even the choice may sacrifice the longevity. What's the point of longevity, when the pursuit of it can compromise our ability to capture the information we may be afraid of possibly losing?

I would contend that capturing a picture is absolutely a massive distortion of reality because reality is three dimensional, exists in many spectra beyond visible light, has sounds, smells, taste, and feeling, and exists in a historical context. The selection of framing, distance, focus, all of these are biases of the photographer. A photo is a lie, too. Just because it's higher resolution doesn't mean it has indeed captured the right information.

Text is a lie too, granted. But in our current digitization zeitgeist, we have forgotten that our media (pictures, video, recordings, not just the TV, cable, and internet) lie to us. Our own bias towards slicing apart the world into computer-digestible bits is just us lying more convincingly to ourselves.

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

#76

Post by tombert »

eatmygodetia wrote: post #60
smasher164 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for a plaintext format to be "complete", it needs some mechanism of associating the language with some segment of text. Plaintext formats that don't acknowledge unified characters are just Latin-biased.

that's basically point - you can open an ascii file now because utf-8 is ascii oriented, but a utf-8 first editor will struggle with an old french text file for example. plain text has inbuilt biases which have changed over time, it's not as pure as simple as people say.

That's something I've always thought; plain text is pure and wonderful for me, an Anglo-writing American, because most of these formats were written for people like me.

I suspect for nearly every other language (or at least any language that doesn't use the ~100 characters/symbols used in the English alphabet), old ASCII text isn't terribly useful.

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

#77

Post by mark-r »

mro_name wrote: post #47
dhosek wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think it was JPEG, it was a custom format that contained multiple resolutions.

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

#78

Post by mark-r »

brians wrote: post #58

“all the binary formats of the 1990s can be opened today” Oh, sweet summer child. Scribe/mss. Koalapad. A bunch of Apple 2GS, Apple 3, and Lisa formats. Lotus Improv. The points about semantics and authenticity are wonderful, but I think the presumption that all formats can be opened is mistaken exactly because those that can’t be opened become effectively invisible and lost.

Survivorship bias it's called.

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

#79

Post by coldtea »

falcolas wrote: post #52
coldtea wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is a ProTools session more authentic than Wav files? Dunno about 'authentic', but since the part you've quoted specifically talks about "loss of information", the WAV files indeed incur loss of information compared to a ProTools session. E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss all the individual channels, for starters. If it's multiple wav files with all the channels as stems, it will still miss…

> E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss all the individual channels, for starters. A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what does make it from the notes to the book, and how it's changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it doesn't also come with all the author…

>A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what does make it from the notes to the book, and how it's changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it doesn't also come with all the author's notes.

Yeah, not really.

In music, for starters, a DAW session is like the recording reels from the analog days. And artists, producers, and studios go back to those reels a lot, for many reasons: to later clean up, rebalance, and release a "remastered version", to adapt to a new format (e.g. Apple/Dolby's spatial audio or some 5:1 surround mix), or simply to give individual parts to collaborators to make a remix of the track, or even just for the artists themselves to plunder it for parts to reuse in later works.

What your comment misses is that we're talking about the author here, not the reader.

The author (or in the DAW session case, the producer/artist) is the one who would be having the original format, and have a choice to keep their stuff as a ProTools session or wav stems, or as a text file or some proprietary format.

So while you "personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or unauthentic because it doesn't also come with all the author's notes.", the author would indeed be furious if we needed his notes and couldn't open them because he wrote his first book+notes in some editor/format since discontinued, and he now only has the final printed or ebook text.

>On a more technical note, underneath the hood, the recorded items are all stored as .wav files too...

Which is neither here nor there regarding the things I've mentioned as lost (e.g. the fx chains used with their settings for re-toggleability, sequenced notes, automation curves, and so on), and is also not generally true across DAWs, depends on the DAW whether they'd use some proprietary format.

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

#80

Post by Chris2048 »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #56

This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more pedantic than I think it needs to be. I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand. The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible." Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you…

> I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text

  Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.

  -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30525605
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