4 ms·

> "Plaintext" is ASCII binary that is overwhelmingly English. I don't see any reason why "plaintext" must be limited to ASCII. Many "plaintext" protocols supp

> "Plaintext" is ASCII binary that is overwhelmingly English. I don't see any reason why "plaintext" must be limited to ASCII. Many "plaintext" protocols support Unicode, including the ones listed in this article. Some protocols use human language (as you said, overwhelmingly English), but many do not. There is nothing inherent about plaintext which necessitates the use of English. > The reason people like plaintext is that we have the tooling to see bits of the protocol as it comes over the wire. If we had good tooling for other protocols, then the barrier to entry would be lower as well. I disagree. Humans have used text as the most ubiquitous protocol for storing and transferring arbitrary information since ancient times. Some other protocols have been developed for specific purposes (eg traffic symbols, hazard icons, charts, or whatever it is IKEA does in their assembly instructions), but none of have matched text in terms of accessibility or practicality for conveying arbitrary information. I think your statement misrepresents the relationship between tool quality and the ubiquity of the protocol. Text has, throughout most of recorded human history, been the most useful and effective mechanism for transferring arbitrary information from one human to another. Text isn't so ubiquitous because our tooling for it is good; our tooling for text is good because it is so ubiquitous. Text is accessible to anyone who can see and is supplemented by other protocols for those who can't (eg braille, spoken language, morse code). It is relatively compact and precise compared to other media like pictures, audio, or video. It is easily extended with additional glyphs and adapted for various languages. There's just nothing that holds a candle to text when it comes to encoding arbitrary information.

waynesonfire 6y ago
There is nothing inherently human readable about plain text. It's still unreadable bits, just like any other binary protocol. The benefits of plain text are the ubiquitous tools that allow us to interact with the format. It would be interesting to think about what set of tools gives 80% of the plain text benefit. Is it cat? grep? wc? API?. Most programming languages I know of can read a text file and turn it into a string, that's nice. The benefit of this analysis would be that when developing a binary protocol, it will be evident the support tools that need to be developed to provide plenty of value. I'm not afraid of binary protocols as long as there is tooling to interact with the data. And if those tools are available, I prefer binary protocols for it's efficiency.
- divbzero 6y ago
  > I'm not afraid of binary protocols as long as there is tooling to interact with the data. I agree with this premise but would also note how long it takes for such tooling to become widespread. Even UTF-8 took awhile to become universal — I recall fiddling with it on the command line as recently as Windows 7 (code page 1252 and the like).
- CivBase 6y ago
  > There is nothing inherently human readable about plain text. It's still unreadable bits, just like any other binary protocol. The benefits of plain text are the ubiquitous tools that allow us to interact with the format. You seem to have glossed over my whole point about how the ubiquity of text is what drives good tooling for it, not the other way around. Text is not a technology created for computers. It has been a ubiquitous information protocol for millennia. > I'm not afraid of binary protocols as long as there is tooling to interact with the data. And if those tools are available, I prefer binary protocols for it's efficiency. I'm not afraid of binary protocols either and there are good reasons to use them. The most common reason is that they can be purpose-built to support much greater information density. However, purpose-built protocols require purpose-built tools and are, by their very nature, limited in application. Therefore, purpose-built protocols will never be as well supported as general-purpose protocols like text. That isn't to say that purpose-built protocols are never supported well enough to be preferable over text. Images, audio, video, databases, programs, and many other types of information are usually stored in well-supported, purpose-built, binary protocols.
- kybernetikos 6y ago
  > It would be interesting to think about what set of tools gives 80% of the plain text benefit. My experience with binary protocols is that one of the first tools you write is one that converts it to a text format, and you then receive nearly 100% of the plain text benefit, as long as you can use that tool.

waynesonfire 6y ago

There is nothing inherently human readable about plain text. It's still unreadable bits, just like any other binary protocol. The benefits of plain text are the ubiquitous tools that allow us to interact with the format. It would be interesting to think about what set of tools gives 80% of the plain text benefit. Is it cat? grep? wc? API?. Most programming languages I know of can read a text file and turn it into a string, that's nice. The benefit of this analysis would be that when developing a binary protocol, it will be evident the support tools that need to be developed to provide plenty of value. I'm not afraid of binary protocols as long as there is tooling to interact with the data. And if those tools are available, I prefer binary protocols for it's efficiency.

divbzero 6y ago
> I'm not afraid of binary protocols as long as there is tooling to interact with the data. I agree with this premise but would also note how long it takes for such tooling to become widespread. Even UTF-8 took awhile to become universal — I recall fiddling with it on the command line as recently as Windows 7 (code page 1252 and the like).
CivBase 6y ago
> There is nothing inherently human readable about plain text. It's still unreadable bits, just like any other binary protocol. The benefits of plain text are the ubiquitous tools that allow us to interact with the format. You seem to have glossed over my whole point about how the ubiquity of text is what drives good tooling for it, not the other way around. Text is not a technology created for computers. It has been a ubiquitous information protocol for millennia. > I'm not afraid of binary protocols as long as there is tooling to interact with the data. And if those tools are available, I prefer binary protocols for it's efficiency. I'm not afraid of binary protocols either and there are good reasons to use them. The most common reason is that they can be purpose-built to support much greater information density. However, purpose-built protocols require purpose-built tools and are, by their very nature, limited in application. Therefore, purpose-built protocols will never be as well supported as general-purpose protocols like text. That isn't to say that purpose-built protocols are never supported well enough to be preferable over text. Images, audio, video, databases, programs, and many other types of information are usually stored in well-supported, purpose-built, binary protocols.
kybernetikos 6y ago
> It would be interesting to think about what set of tools gives 80% of the plain text benefit. My experience with binary protocols is that one of the first tools you write is one that converts it to a text format, and you then receive nearly 100% of the plain text benefit, as long as you can use that tool.