6 ms·

I disagree with the whole "NEED VISUALS OR GRAPHICS?" section. I do need visuals! I do need graphics! I'm not a typewriter, why must my flow be interrupted with

I disagree with the whole "NEED VISUALS OR GRAPHICS?" section. I do need visuals! I do need graphics! I'm not a typewriter, why must my flow be interrupted with me having to leave my document to open some JPEG file whenever I need to show something that isn't text? It's not like this is crazy difficult or requires proprietary apps either. Writing a modern browser may be an impossible feat but I'm certain that it would take just a day or two to get a very simple barebones HTML renderer which supports <img> and a couple of formatting options. At this point I wish we had a tty which supports variable width and size text and inline images and video. Then I could be happy.

jodrellblank 5y ago
It's 2022 and people like the blog author are all "who needs screenshots? who needs audio? who needs colours? who needs fonts or styles? who wants to see their handwriting strokes? who needs metadata? I use text because it's 1970!". Hello? 4K video in my pocket, structured data streaming out of every system around me, all I'm supposed to want to capture is plain text? What a paucity of information, of detail, what an absense of dreaming, what a position taken purely from fear - never have nice things because you might lose them one day!
- cobbaut 5y ago
  So when you need to remember a user/password combo for a new device, offline doorbell maybe, or a parcel number, or the address of a friend, then you record a 4K video instead of writing it in a text file? Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.
  - qayxc 5y ago
    > Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time. No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. Try a a plain text instruction sheet vs an illustrated one. Try plain text sheet music vs actual sheet music. Try a mathematical plot vs plain text tables. Try concept drawings of product vs text descriptions. Try construction drawing vs plain text descriptions. I could go on and on. Narrow views on the world result in flawed thinking and absolutes that are just plain wrong.
    - Siira 5y ago
      > Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. It’s called a Hardware Description Language. According to my textbooks, they’re the industry standard. My personal experience certainly prefers them to unusable “diagram” drawing GUIs. > Try a mathematical plot vs plain text tables. You can do plots in unicode. And more importantly, the code that produces the plot is plain text. Pretty much anything regular can be done better with a plain text source that subsequently compiles to more visual mediums.
      - qayxc 5y ago
        > It’s called a Hardware Description Language. According to my textbooks, they’re the industry standard So when confronted with a faulty circuit board with multimeter in hand and bench power supply on stand-by, you are looking at VHDL like this Library ieee; use ieee.std_logic_1164.all; entity mux is port(S1,S0,D0,D1,D2,D3:in bit; Y:out bit); end mux; architecture data of mux is begin Y<= (not S0 and not S1 and D0) or (S0 and not S1 and D1) or (not S0 and S1 and D2) or (S0 and S1 and D3); end data; to figure out which components might be broken when there's a buck converter that gets no power or where the capacitor is located that should smooth out incoming voltage on a certain bus. Yeah, sure. > You can do plots in unicode. And more importantly, the code that produces the plot is plain text. So you're one of those people who don't listen to electronic music and prefers to read the parameters of the VCAs, LFOs and VCFs instead? After all it's just code that produces the sound waves in the end, no? > Pretty much anything regular can be done better with a plain text source that subsequently compiles to more visual mediums. And again we're back to data storage vs representation. I'm interested in the representation, not the storage format. If you're one of those geniuses that can squint at a quintic formula and say - yep, there's a local maximum at about x=-9.7513, more power to you. The rest of us prefer a curve.
    - sicariusnoctis 5y ago
      > No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. I'm not an EE, but there's SPICE for regular electronic circuits and SysVerilog et al for logic circuits. Math can be typeset in LaTeX, though its plain text readability depends on the formula. Category theory diagrams can be written in a simple language. Sheet music is some sort of XML, though I imagine there could be a more human writable/readable plain text format for this too. There was also a recent post about Markdown diagrams. And of course, code is still entirely text. Much of what you mentioned can be described in a concise, portable text-based language. Though these documents are readable as text, they can be further rendered for best readability. Luckily, many can also be live previewed.
  - mro_name 5y ago
    I find Edward Tuftes reflections on powerpoint vs. engineer-prose very eye-opening. https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1 https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... Prose takes time, contemplation and thought. Leslie Lamport says similar. Helps with understanding however not so much with selling.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    Obviously not. Nobody is saying that plain text is never the right solution. Just that it isn't always the right solution.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    What about a note of the dimensions of a room, furniture, or piece of equipment? Suddenly you need a diagram.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    I often see a serial number on a device and take a photo rather than typing on a phone keyboard. Or use software which blocks clipboard functionality and take a screenshot instead of typing it out, yes. OneNote does character recognition on all images and makes them searchable. If a doorbell or key safe has a keypad and I need my computer to look up the code, what difference does it make if the code is text or photo of scribble? Because one day my computer might forget how to open bitmap files? How likely is that? The safe will have turned to dust before all software which can read JPGs is lost to history). > "Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time." My point is not "text doesn't work", but it would be good if other things worked that well and there's no good reason why they can't. You don't eat plain oatmeal for every meal because it works, and shun restaurants because one day they might close. You don't plug your ears because you can read lyrics and sheet music and one day you might go deaf. This is like the "first class functions" of programming. Wanting first class functions is not saying that plain loops don't work, it's saying that more powerful things are desirable even if they aren't cross-language compatible.
murermader 5y ago
I mean you could also just use Markdown. Put the image in the same folder, so you don’t loose it, and then use a relative link from your text file. If you are using a markdown viewer it should render nicely, if you are using a text editor there is just a path where the image should be, so also no problem. Some editors like Typora can be configured to automatically save images next to the markdown file, which is really helpful.
Dave3of5 5y ago
> but I'm certain that it would take just a day or two to get a very simple barebones HTML renderer which supports <img> and a couple of formatting options. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect This tells me you've never actually tried this. For example the img tag allows you to, amongst other things, render an svg. If you want a more full spec you can see here what it takes to render an img element: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/images.html https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/images.html
- smasher164 5y ago
  > For example the img tag allows you to, amongst other things, render an svg. I don't think the GP meant "write an image renderer" when they said "get a very simple barebones HTML renderer". Most languages have libraries for encoding/decoding images in various formats, so aside from how it would fit into document layout, this is a non-issue.
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  What I said right before the part you quoted was "Writing a modern browser may be an impossible feat" and the part you quoted talks about a "barebones HTML renderer". What I'm describing is labels and images in a VStack. This is something any operating system UI toolkit (open source ones too!) can do.

jodrellblank 5y ago

It's 2022 and people like the blog author are all "who needs screenshots? who needs audio? who needs colours? who needs fonts or styles? who wants to see their handwriting strokes? who needs metadata? I use text because it's 1970!". Hello? 4K video in my pocket, structured data streaming out of every system around me, all I'm supposed to want to capture is plain text? What a paucity of information, of detail, what an absense of dreaming, what a position taken purely from fear - never have nice things because you might lose them one day!

cobbaut 5y ago
So when you need to remember a user/password combo for a new device, offline doorbell maybe, or a parcel number, or the address of a friend, then you record a 4K video instead of writing it in a text file? Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.
- qayxc 5y ago
  > Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time. No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. Try a a plain text instruction sheet vs an illustrated one. Try plain text sheet music vs actual sheet music. Try a mathematical plot vs plain text tables. Try concept drawings of product vs text descriptions. Try construction drawing vs plain text descriptions. I could go on and on. Narrow views on the world result in flawed thinking and absolutes that are just plain wrong.
  - Siira 5y ago
    > Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. It’s called a Hardware Description Language. According to my textbooks, they’re the industry standard. My personal experience certainly prefers them to unusable “diagram” drawing GUIs. > Try a mathematical plot vs plain text tables. You can do plots in unicode. And more importantly, the code that produces the plot is plain text. Pretty much anything regular can be done better with a plain text source that subsequently compiles to more visual mediums.
    - qayxc 5y ago
      > It’s called a Hardware Description Language. According to my textbooks, they’re the industry standard So when confronted with a faulty circuit board with multimeter in hand and bench power supply on stand-by, you are looking at VHDL like this Library ieee; use ieee.std_logic_1164.all; entity mux is port(S1,S0,D0,D1,D2,D3:in bit; Y:out bit); end mux; architecture data of mux is begin Y<= (not S0 and not S1 and D0) or (S0 and not S1 and D1) or (not S0 and S1 and D2) or (S0 and S1 and D3); end data; to figure out which components might be broken when there's a buck converter that gets no power or where the capacitor is located that should smooth out incoming voltage on a certain bus. Yeah, sure. > You can do plots in unicode. And more importantly, the code that produces the plot is plain text. So you're one of those people who don't listen to electronic music and prefers to read the parameters of the VCAs, LFOs and VCFs instead? After all it's just code that produces the sound waves in the end, no? > Pretty much anything regular can be done better with a plain text source that subsequently compiles to more visual mediums. And again we're back to data storage vs representation. I'm interested in the representation, not the storage format. If you're one of those geniuses that can squint at a quintic formula and say - yep, there's a local maximum at about x=-9.7513, more power to you. The rest of us prefer a curve.
  - sicariusnoctis 5y ago
    > No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. I'm not an EE, but there's SPICE for regular electronic circuits and SysVerilog et al for logic circuits. Math can be typeset in LaTeX, though its plain text readability depends on the formula. Category theory diagrams can be written in a simple language. Sheet music is some sort of XML, though I imagine there could be a more human writable/readable plain text format for this too. There was also a recent post about Markdown diagrams. And of course, code is still entirely text. Much of what you mentioned can be described in a concise, portable text-based language. Though these documents are readable as text, they can be further rendered for best readability. Luckily, many can also be live previewed.
- mro_name 5y ago
  I find Edward Tuftes reflections on powerpoint vs. engineer-prose very eye-opening. https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1 https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=... Prose takes time, contemplation and thought. Leslie Lamport says similar. Helps with understanding however not so much with selling.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Obviously not. Nobody is saying that plain text is never the right solution. Just that it isn't always the right solution.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  What about a note of the dimensions of a room, furniture, or piece of equipment? Suddenly you need a diagram.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  I often see a serial number on a device and take a photo rather than typing on a phone keyboard. Or use software which blocks clipboard functionality and take a screenshot instead of typing it out, yes. OneNote does character recognition on all images and makes them searchable. If a doorbell or key safe has a keypad and I need my computer to look up the code, what difference does it make if the code is text or photo of scribble? Because one day my computer might forget how to open bitmap files? How likely is that? The safe will have turned to dust before all software which can read JPGs is lost to history). > "Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time." My point is not "text doesn't work", but it would be good if other things worked that well and there's no good reason why they can't. You don't eat plain oatmeal for every meal because it works, and shun restaurants because one day they might close. You don't plug your ears because you can read lyrics and sheet music and one day you might go deaf. This is like the "first class functions" of programming. Wanting first class functions is not saying that plain loops don't work, it's saying that more powerful things are desirable even if they aren't cross-language compatible.

murermader 5y ago

I mean you could also just use Markdown. Put the image in the same folder, so you don’t loose it, and then use a relative link from your text file. If you are using a markdown viewer it should render nicely, if you are using a text editor there is just a path where the image should be, so also no problem. Some editors like Typora can be configured to automatically save images next to the markdown file, which is really helpful.

Dave3of5 5y ago

> but I'm certain that it would take just a day or two to get a very simple barebones HTML renderer which supports <img> and a couple of formatting options. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect This tells me you've never actually tried this. For example the img tag allows you to, amongst other things, render an svg. If you want a more full spec you can see here what it takes to render an img element: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/images.html https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/images.html

smasher164 5y ago
> For example the img tag allows you to, amongst other things, render an svg. I don't think the GP meant "write an image renderer" when they said "get a very simple barebones HTML renderer". Most languages have libraries for encoding/decoding images in various formats, so aside from how it would fit into document layout, this is a non-issue.
emptyparadise 5y ago
What I said right before the part you quoted was "Writing a modern browser may be an impossible feat" and the part you quoted talks about a "barebones HTML renderer". What I'm describing is labels and images in a VStack. This is something any operating system UI toolkit (open source ones too!) can do.