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Some people are saying they don't want to use OneNote because they don't want to store their data in a binary, proprietary format that's not future-proof. I agr

Some people are saying they don't want to use OneNote because they don't want to store their data in a binary, proprietary format that's not future-proof. I agree. But I think we're not defining the problem well by focusing on the application: A failure of the tech community is that we never provided the equivalent of a plain text format for the multimedia age: An open, universal mixed-media file format. With a standard format we'd have editors popping up that target it, the way we have such a great ecosystem of text editors. HTML does the job in a way, but it's not portable. One of the HTML archive formats might do the job, but none are widely supported (AFAIK).

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Naive: what's wrong with xml? Way more self-describing than binary that's for sure.
- cwyers 11y ago
  XML is not so much a file format as it is a tool for creating file formats. Word and Excel both produce XML files, and technically you can edit those with a generic XML editor, but it's not the same experience.
gvb 11y ago
How about MIME? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME * ASCII encoded / support for other character sets * Mixed media * Standard * Battle tested
- frik 11y ago
  several browsers and email programs support MIME incl IE9-11 (.mht), Opera (12?) It's called MHTL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mht
  - scholia 11y ago
    You can also add MHTML support to Firefox and probably Chrome...
- hackuser 11y ago
  Good question. Can anyone say why it's not more widely used for this purpose?
  - gvb 11y ago
    Inefficiency and effort involved. 1. Encoding and decoding the data takes time and code. 2. The encoding expands binary by 4/3 (three bytes are encoded into four) 3. Duplication - e.g. if the same image is included in N places it will (likely) get encoded and stored N times, costing time (encode/decode) and space. Like everything, it is a trade-off.
7952 11y ago
A few months ago I developed an intranet app for a team of consultants. The project manager asked if they could save it to their shared network drive. Naively I said yes of course just save a link. Later I found that he had just done "save as" from his web browser and created an offline version! It made me wonder if it is something that should be possible. Storing html files containing actual data on a drive is actually quite elegant: * The user has an intuitive understanding of files and can manage them using existing tools. * Easy to backup. * User level security is as simple as setting file permissions. * All computers have a web browser that can render the content. Could raw html be used? I am not sure that a packaging format is even necessary when you can use a data URI for images.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Naive: what's wrong with xml? Way more self-describing than binary that's for sure.

cwyers 11y ago
XML is not so much a file format as it is a tool for creating file formats. Word and Excel both produce XML files, and technically you can edit those with a generic XML editor, but it's not the same experience.

gvb 11y ago

How about MIME? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME * ASCII encoded / support for other character sets * Mixed media * Standard * Battle tested

frik 11y ago
several browsers and email programs support MIME incl IE9-11 (.mht), Opera (12?) It's called MHTL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mht https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mht
- scholia 11y ago
  You can also add MHTML support to Firefox and probably Chrome...
hackuser 11y ago
Good question. Can anyone say why it's not more widely used for this purpose?
- gvb 11y ago
  Inefficiency and effort involved. 1. Encoding and decoding the data takes time and code. 2. The encoding expands binary by 4/3 (three bytes are encoded into four) 3. Duplication - e.g. if the same image is included in N places it will (likely) get encoded and stored N times, costing time (encode/decode) and space. Like everything, it is a trade-off.

7952 11y ago

A few months ago I developed an intranet app for a team of consultants. The project manager asked if they could save it to their shared network drive. Naively I said yes of course just save a link. Later I found that he had just done "save as" from his web browser and created an offline version! It made me wonder if it is something that should be possible. Storing html files containing actual data on a drive is actually quite elegant: * The user has an intuitive understanding of files and can manage them using existing tools. * Easy to backup. * User level security is as simple as setting file permissions. * All computers have a web browser that can render the content. Could raw html be used? I am not sure that a packaging format is even necessary when you can use a data URI for images.