This article annoys me whenever it reappears because it just isn’t clear on what it means by ‘text’. Sometimes it seems to mean ‘the English language’ or ‘lang

This article annoys me whenever it reappears because it just isn’t clear on what it means by ‘text’. Sometimes it seems to mean ‘the English language’ or ‘language’ more broadly. Other times it seems to mean ‘strings of ASCII encoded Latin letters’. Sometimes it seems to mean ‘pictures of arrangements of letter like symbols’. In general it just amounts to ‘linear streams of data’. Sure, if you define text that broadly, it covers a lot of things that are great. But it’s a definition that’s so broad it defies its own terms. Text, defined that way, encompasses SVG files. Or even base64 encoded PNG files if you want. So that Twitter logo can be unambiguously shared through ‘text’ too. Look - here’s a tweet-sized version: https://twitter.com/bbcmicrobot/status/1237867433064464394?s=21 https://twitter.com/bbcmicrobot/status/1237867433064464394?s... But there’s a weird cultural bias built in to the assertion that all those things are ‘just text’. Sure, for someone who uses a US keyboard to type Latin alphabet characters left to right, base64 encoded binary, svg, or BBC BASIC, is ‘just text’. But that’s not exactly a universal perspective. In the limit, this amounts to ‘always bet on data transmission and storage’. A lot of the listed benefits of text are only realizable when the text is coupled with a specific ‘interpreter’ - be that an SVG renderer, a BBC micro, or a human who speaks English. Doing stuff with text with computers is hard! Lexers, parsers and tokenizers are probably the most common sources of security bugs in history. And if the text is natural language, we still don’t have reliable computer tools for dealing with it - understanding or generating. So I just guess I don’t really know what the point of this piece is. Data is all there is. Linear streams of data are often a thing. Because of the history of computing, western language character sets and conventions are often used to capture them in the same format as we use for written language.