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Plain-text just needs to be the format. Checkout (e.g.) Markdown editors like Typora. The underlying format is Markdown, but it can be edited and displayed in
by pyre 9y ago
Plain-text just needs to be the format. Checkout (e.g.) Markdown editors like Typora. The underlying format is Markdown, but it can be edited and displayed in a more visual fashion.
With the text being in plain-text, it guarantees someone the base ability to just open up (e.g.) Notepad.exe if all else fails vs. trying to open up a Powerpoint '97 presentation with embedded RealMedia files in 2017.
- emodendroket 9y agoYou almost certainly can open PowerPoint 97 files today. Probably RealMedia too. Even better, going forward, pptx (and docx, etc.) are open standards.
- rubatuga 9y ago"Open" yet there fails to be a compatible office suite that can render pptx and docx in the same way.
- emodendroket 9y agoThere are two answers to that. One is that to fully support these rich formats you have to have compete feature parity with Office, which isn't trivial. The other is that we're comparing to plain text, which doesn't even pretend to give you any control over how things look.
- Spooky23 9y agoThe alternative offered is Markdown. How can you say that it's ok for Humans to revert to raw Markdown, but unacceptable to open a legacy .ppt format in an application that may not render with 100% fidelity?
- pyre 9y agoNo one ever said that humans need to write raw Markdown. Take a look at Typora as an example Markdown editor. Raw Markdown would be the fallback scenario, which is still readable/grok-able. docx/pptx/xlsx don't have such a fallback scenario.
- emodendroket 9y agoThere are countless software packages that can edit and display Office XML files besides just the Office package, so I'd think the fallback scenario is using one of those.
- pmlnr 9y agoTypora is surprisingly pleasant to use, so +1 for that.