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It's like markdown, but for data. Just like markdown provides a quick way in that to renderize something pretty, but is still readable in plain text, recfiles
by yuonotthat 7y ago
It's like markdown, but for data.
Just like markdown provides a quick way in that to renderize something pretty, but is still readable in plain text, recfiles do the same for data, it has data types, keys, integrity, and is easily queryable with its tools, and also easily read in plain text.
Sure, you could use some type CSV, but that is not pretty to read as recfiles. The point is the same as markdown, usable as just text, but with good tooling around it.
with markdown files in a dirs, you would have to provide you own tooling.
- ahnick 7y agoOkay, but markdown is data (perhaps not well structured, but data nonetheless) + formatting. If I'm editing and going into the files directly anyway why do I need to be able to do queries? I guess I'm asking what's the point? Can't I find the info I want just using find and grep on a bunch of markdown files? Maybe I don't even have to do that if I've organized my markdown files sufficiently well. Let me be clear, I get that you don't have db operations with a bunch of markdown files with a directory structure, but on small scale data repositories do you really need that? For example, if I have a bunch of recipes in my "personal database of markdown files" I can quickly find the chili recipe I'm looking for by going to the directory "Soups & Salads > Chili > Slow Cooker Chili Recipe" or something along those lines. Or I could have grepped for "slow cooker chili". Either way I'm going to find that recipe with no extra tooling on my part. Where do rec files features add value? Plus, if I use rec files now it seems I have to build my own formatting because I can't rely on markdown editors to build it automatically for me. Or is there a way to specify formatting for rec files?
- jamestomasino 7y agoHere's a real example: https://gopher.tildeverse.org/sdf.org/0/users/dbucklin/posts/maintenance.txt https://gopher.tildeverse.org/sdf.org/0/users/dbucklin/posts...
- GoblinSlayer 7y agoRecfile is for tabular data, markdown is for text documents.
- rolandog 7y agoAgreed. A Recfiles is to CSV what YAML is to JSON (and what MarkDown is to HTML).