5 ms·
A Love Letter to Plain Text
- azov 9y agoA love letter to plain text would be a bit more lovely without so much unnecessary formatting (colors, borders, and other embellishments).
- kqr 9y agoPlain text as a storage medium, not as a design element.
- paulie_a 9y agoMost design is unnecessary when it comes to plaintext. Personally I disable most fonts and limit the sizes to improve my browsing experience
- frou_dh 9y ago"Find A Way To Call TFA Author A Hypocrite" seems to be a whole genre of news aggregator comment
- bartread 9y agoI suspect it's a cheap way to gain karma/rep/internet points.
- rootlocus 9y agoOnly for articles with pretentious titles.
- coldtea 9y agoYeah, "love letter to plain text" -- who does he think he is? Such gall! /s
- mathgeek 9y agoI came in expecting the article to be pretty light on formatting, yet this one was one of the most oddly formatted articles I've read in a while. It's quite strange.
- bhrgunatha 9y agoI think it looks beautiful. And what's more, what an absolute joy to find something published on the web where the text has both good contrast, weight and width. I'm totally fed up having to use the browser's developer tools or firefox reader mode because the text has font-weight 200/300, slightly darker grey on light grey text and uses less than 30% of my screen width. It's so sad that this is such a rare treat on the web these days.
- jacquesm 9y agoYour browser should have a 'no style' option tucked away somewhere. Presentation is - according to the original web spec, not the present monstrosity - mostly the job of the client.
- adamkruszewski 9y agoIsn't "reader mode" available on some browsers almost a "no style" option? I use it exactly for that reason. I admit not every page is reader-mode-enabled but I just don't bother with those.
- manaskarekar 9y agoIn Firefox, you can select View > Page Style > None. Of course there is also the reader mode.
- venuur 9y agoAgeed! It was too painful to read on my phone. Dark red on black is a questionable design choice. I appreciate the desire to standout, but usability should trump style.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kqr 9y agoWithout subtracting anything from the main point on plain text, it sounds like this person is in many senses reinventing the Org file format!
- jeremiep 9y agoorg-mode is one of my favorite discoveries in recent years. I'm now only using Markdown when I absolutely have to and live in org-mode for everything else. And I've only just began scratching the surface of org's features!
- Avshalom 9y ago... starts by loading everything into a database.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 9y agoA far cry from jekyll
- evibeefi 9y agoWhy is this trending?
- solarkraft 9y agoNice that I see this article just while I'm working on a theme for Hugo. I like TOML and YAML for their simple approaches. You'll usually need some kind of structure, though.
- Avamander 9y agoWhoa that's an ugly webpage. It's so huge!
- ntlve 9y agoBut it's so legible!
- Aaargh20318 9y agoWhat is 'plain text' ? Is it ASCII ? 7 or 8 bit ? EBCDIC ? UTF-8 ?
- rootlocus 9y agoEncodings do not make text a binary format. This pedantry is uncalled for.
- Aaargh20318 9y agoI'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. I also think that plain text is a bad idea, binary files are much easier to parse.
- coldtea 9y ago>I'm just saying there is no such thing as 'plain text'. And yet, everyone agrees there is, and has no problem telling its case from other formats, even if they're all 0s and 1s underneath.
- wodenokoto 9y agoThat is not true. Guessing encoding is really, really difficult, and you can easily end up reading a file with an uncommon Japanese encoding as an Chinese encoding and end up with subtitle errors. Plain text is anything but plain.
- madhadron 9y agoAmerican programmers with little exposure to the world beyond their personal milieu agree that there is. The rest of the world stringently disagrees.
- coldtea 9y agoI'm not an american programmer, and we used to have 2-3 of our own encodings in my country (or "codepages" as it was referred to back in the day) before utf-8 took care of that. Because of that having to handle international text was the default from since I started professionally programming. So, nope. Still, missing the point. The difference between plain text formats and binary formats is not that plain text files do no consist of bytes or don't need an encoding to read them. It's being able to work on them with a plain text editor, and being based on actual written text -- as opposed to packed bytes and custom (proprietary or not) formats.
- baxtr 9y agoAs a side note: I find it amazing how many private pictures the author is sharing on his public Flickr album, which is linked on the website.
- Ultimatt 9y agoBy definition the author doesn't consider them private so why is it amazing. What's more amazing is someone would go and even look at them let alone comment on their content!
- therealmarv 9y agoThis is not just Plain Text. Hugo is not that good for a bunch of text/markdown files. My advice is to look more into mkdocs which is a bunch of markdown files in a directory structure presented nicely (even implements js search).