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>> I don't hear people wanting a human readable text representation of their audio, video or images. This is, in fact, a huge concern for people who think abou

>> I don't hear people wanting a human readable text representation of their audio, video or images. This is, in fact, a huge concern for people who think about accessibility.

bastawhiz 8y ago
Indeed! Facebook spends a ridiculous amount of resources creating text summaries of what's in user-provided images. Check out the alt="" tags next time you're scrolling through your feed. Every single image has one.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Of course, their methodology for doing so is nonstandard, since there are obvious incentives for Facebook to use it and keep it to themselves. Unfortunately this keeps these transformations out of reach for most applications.
- delecti 8y ago
  I just checked what you're talking about. Creepiness aside, that's kinda awesome.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    iOS also does the same thing - if you turn on VoiceOver and go into your photo library it will read out what's in the photos
borplk 8y ago
Ok but what I'm talking about is a little more specific. Talking about "human readability" of JSON and XML is a little bit like talking about human readability of JPEG or MP3. Chasing after it creates a lot of problems. Formats like JSON and XML often carry lots of textual information so it's tempting to want them to be like "just like text but with some extra stuff" but that creates its own problems. So it would be interesting to have something like JSON but philosophically treat it like MP3. Meaning, don't assume that humans must fiddle with the bytes in a text editor with great ease so that the representation can be designed without the influence of "would the raw bytes look pretty to people?".
- zenhack 8y ago
  What you're proposing sounds like cbor and/or messagepack (which are virtually identical in their design), or argdata[1]. I agree it's a pretty solid spot in the design space. [1]: https://github.com/NuxiNL/argdata https://github.com/NuxiNL/argdata
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
azernik 8y ago
Generally the way we address it is not to make the formats themselves human-readable; that's a fool's errand. Instead we create tools to transform them into human-readable formats on demand. See also the protobuf toolchain.

>> I don't hear people wanting a human readable text representation of their audio, video or images. This is, in fact, a huge concern for people who think about accessibility.

bastawhiz 8y ago

Indeed! Facebook spends a ridiculous amount of resources creating text summaries of what's in user-provided images. Check out the alt="" tags next time you're scrolling through your feed. Every single image has one.

saagarjha 8y ago
Of course, their methodology for doing so is nonstandard, since there are obvious incentives for Facebook to use it and keep it to themselves. Unfortunately this keeps these transformations out of reach for most applications.
delecti 8y ago
I just checked what you're talking about. Creepiness aside, that's kinda awesome.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  iOS also does the same thing - if you turn on VoiceOver and go into your photo library it will read out what's in the photos

borplk 8y ago

Ok but what I'm talking about is a little more specific. Talking about "human readability" of JSON and XML is a little bit like talking about human readability of JPEG or MP3. Chasing after it creates a lot of problems. Formats like JSON and XML often carry lots of textual information so it's tempting to want them to be like "just like text but with some extra stuff" but that creates its own problems. So it would be interesting to have something like JSON but philosophically treat it like MP3. Meaning, don't assume that humans must fiddle with the bytes in a text editor with great ease so that the representation can be designed without the influence of "would the raw bytes look pretty to people?".

zenhack 8y ago
What you're proposing sounds like cbor and/or messagepack (which are virtually identical in their design), or argdata[1]. I agree it's a pretty solid spot in the design space. [1]: https://github.com/NuxiNL/argdata https://github.com/NuxiNL/argdata
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

azernik 8y ago

Generally the way we address it is not to make the formats themselves human-readable; that's a fool's errand. Instead we create tools to transform them into human-readable formats on demand. See also the protobuf toolchain.