25 ms·

Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

138 points by yumiris 5y ago

ggm 5y ago
he said.. in courier, monospaced paragraphs format, morally as close to "plaintext" as you can be with a couple of diagrams which could have been ASCII art...
- lbriner 5y ago
 Exactly. The OP said what they needed to in plain text because it captures what they wanted to say in the simplest format. If they had needed to convey an image or contextual information like some rich API spec, they would presumably have used something else.
- kleiba 5y ago
 That is not a contradiction. The OP is just arguing that you should use the best medium + format for the job - and sometimes simple text is sufficient (as it says in the article).
- ciphol 5y ago
 Ironically, the "pro plain text" link posted earlier used lots of formatting. I don't see why pure plain text is better in any way than plain text with formatting, like a simplified form of HTML (<a>, , , some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text. Images have their own value, as do animations and video on occasion. Here matters become more complicated - image formats are generally non-human-readable and non-diffable (though SVG or a similar format could solve those problems for schematic-type images) and image conversions generally involve data loss. For starters, though, one should at least use a non-proprietary format for images and video.
 - alanbernstein 5y ago
 As the pro-plain-text post said: HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.
 - ciphol 5y ago
 It depends. XML is generally not human-readable, it's got way too much programming code in relation to the amount of human content. But a simple subset of HTML is definitely human-readable.
 - mro_name 5y ago
 No, not when it comes to what reading person they target. Here text/plain is the only that works for e.g. my mother.
 - b112 5y ago
 like a simplified form of HTML (<a>, , , some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text. Yes, but, the problem isn't typically being proprietary, when it comes to future use, but a closed, non standard, unknown format. Yet you're creating a new standard here, with your own rules, which no one will understand, and which no automated tools can convert to another format. (Eg some kind of table formatting) Better to be 100% html than this. (Maybe you meant that, but regardless, this is a good place for me to comment on standards being more important than anything else.)
 - mro_name 5y ago
 > no one will understand that's a bit harsh. And frankly, I don't understand 100% english either, but still we use it to communicate.
 - b112 5y ago
 The point isn't that you can learn it, but instead, having to learn it by examining it in depth, always wondering if there are things not used yet (does the doc you look at, only show part of the standard in its formatting? Imagine a doc not using a tag, but the tag is in other docs...), and then, writing code to covert it. Standards exist for a reason. We already have issues with people not understanding specs, and writing data out of spec, even with that spec in RFC's!
 mro_name 5y ago
 my favourite is the spec that was changed after the fact: Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339#section-5.6 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339#section-5.6 But what harm does it to restrict oneself to a few html tags?
- gwern 5y ago
 And if the diagrams had been ASCII art diagrams (eg https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/1498541884796542977 https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/1498541884796542977 ), OP could fix the typo in the diagram with a keystroke.
 - yumiris 5y ago
 Cheers for the heads-up on the typo. The diagram's an SVG, with the labels being in plain ASCII. One keystroke is all it took indeed! :P On the serious side, ASCII art diagrams are splendid and I very often use them myself, though they can get quite complex and thus messy to maintain. There comes a certain point where they lose their simplicity, sadly.
llarsson 5y ago
That "some" proprietary formats from the 80's and 90's are still readable is already causing real problems: because not *all* are. So text, possibly with Markdown or similar hints regarding emphasis and structure, is still vastly better than any alternative I can think of.
- c0balt 5y ago
  Additionally the option to (relatively) easily transform markdown or richtext to another format is a great when you want to try a new tool and/or format.
  - eddieroger 5y ago
    That's the real secret, I think, keeping content up to date. Text isn't the only medium that can be treated that way, too. My family converted lots of analog audio and video tapes to DVD some years ago, and I immediately turned around and ripped them to digital, lossless types and stored them on a few hard drives and eventually a cloud backup. Will FLAC and MP4 last forever? Nope, probably not, but if I check in on these files every few years, update the players that I've saved (VLC), and periodically convert them to newer formats, I feel comfortable that my grandchildren will be able to hear their great-great-grandparents' road trip to California, or see video of my bar mitzvah on whatever screen they're using years from now.
    - nayuki 5y ago
      Nitpick - DVD is digital. When you said "digital", you probably meant "computer file based" format, as opposed to a physical disc format. Similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682996
- sleepycatgirl 5y ago
  Yup. Or .org for that matter,
- dhosek 5y ago
  I bumped into this recently with a couple Kodak PhotoCDs I uncovered last month. Trying to get the pictures out of the PCD files is turning out to be more challenging than I expected.
anotherevan 5y ago
Reminds me of the Einstein quote: Make something as simple as possible, but no more so. Paraphrased: Make your information capture format as simple as possible, but no more so.
yumiris 5y ago
This was concocted at 5AM -- my apologies for any peculiar sentence structures or odd phrasing. Will re-re-re-revise it again with fresh eyes after resting 'em!
copperx 5y ago
> but dismissing or abandoning media files is a much more guaranteed potential loss of information – information which plain text cannot capture due to its limitations. Some examples are sorely needed. How is a Word/InDesign file more authentic than a plain text file? Or is the author talking about media? Is a ProTools session more authentic than Wav files?
- lallysingh 5y ago
  I've read some docs with ASCII art diagrams far more complex than the medium really allowed. I would have preferred PDF/A
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Is a ProTools session more authentic than Wav files? Dunno about 'authentic', but since the part you've quoted specifically talks about "loss of information", the WAV files indeed incur loss of information compared to a ProTools session. E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss all the individual channels, for starters. If it's multiple wav files with all the channels as stems, it will still miss the effect chain settings (and hardcode them in the final result), the MIDI notes (hardcoded as the rendered VST output), session markers, tempo change tracks, and other such things.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    > E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss all the individual channels, for starters. A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what does make it from the notes to the book, and how it's changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it doesn't also come with all the author's notes. So, if it's not in the final mix, it's because it's not supposed to be in the final mix; it's not that the data is lost because of technical limitations. And like notes from a book, unless you throw them away, they're not going anywhere. On a more technical note, underneath the hood, the recorded items are all stored as .wav files too...
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
I think longevity is not just an issue of the data format but more so of its organization. It so happens that text files organized using the file system is the most easily producible, maintainable and queryable data organization tool. But other media can have the same properties if they're organized using the file system rather than any complex tools. I have graphs and datasheets that have endured decades that I refer to often and are easily findable because they are well-named files in well-named folders, even though the formats are comparatively much more complex.
aasasd 5y ago
I got quite a lot of use out of metadata over the years, such that now I'll probably get a nervous itch and tremors all over my body if I attempt to use just plain text. Specifically, the creation and modification times for each addition to my notes are rather valuable, especially with the work-from-home lifestyle aka ‘day fades into night into day’—with which more people are gonna be familiarized in these years. Thankfully I'm using Org-mode these days, which is reasonably ‘plain text’ under practical definitions—but I make dozens new headings every week, and each of them is stamped with the creation time. But boy do I miss having modification times too—should probably finally set up automatic commits to Git. Also need to mess with Orgzly so that it marks notes that are created on the phone.
- ParetoOptimal 5y ago
  What are some things you use modification times for?
  - aasasd 5y ago
    When I used Evernote and my notes were larger in scale, I mostly used the modification time to figure out how long a particular note was lying around without updates—so abandoned-forgotten projects and such stuff, basically tracking how much I actually use the notes. (Evernote went to shit over the years, so don't take this as an endorsement.) Sometimes it's also useful to figure out what I was doing when writing a note, by placing the time among my other activities. This gives some context for the thoughts. Now that I migrated to outlines and the notes are much more granular, plus I started making more of them—they can often serve as a timestamped log of my day. When did I eat the breakfast—so I can put the dinner in the stomach before it begins an acid-fest? Well, I logged watching an episode of the series during the breakfast, so the creation time tells me the answer. I'm scatterbrained, okay. Or rather, the notes are part of my ‘brain’ now. In fact, I do miss granular times in other logs of my activity—ironically, in regard to privacy. I watched a video on a particular topic around last summer, and would like to find it now—but YT's ‘watch history’ is crude and just leafing through all of it is infeasible. (Actually, perhaps I should look into the ‘takeout’ dumps of activity for the timestamps, and make a list of the vids in a better format.)
VariableStar 5y ago
IMO the question is more about which standards are used, rather than specifying an specific format. In particular, using open and free standards and formats increases the chance to retrieve and use data after long time storage. Different formats suit different data types.
amiga1200 5y ago
The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in plain text.
- wl 5y ago
  In a complicated, undocumented format that had to be reverse-engineered (Sumerian/Akkadian/Hittite cuneiform).
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    And those clay tablets were all craggly-surfaced and far too thick to fit in my DVD player! Shabby archivists, those Babylonians.
dade_ 5y ago
MD for all things text and SVG journals for handwritten notes, diagrams, sketches, screenshots. Works great, but haven’t found a way to integrate them beyond using a common set of folders.
- mxuribe 5y ago
  > ...SVG journals for handwritten... Would you kindly clarify this? Did you mean scan in handwritten material but save it in a scalable image format like SVG? I'm quite interested but maybe i'm not capturing what you mean here, because i have not had my breakfast. :-)
  - dade_ 5y ago
    I use Write (iPad/Windows/Ubuntu/Android) to take handwritten notes and jot info. I first started using SVG on my Sony eReader, it used this vector format. http://www.styluslabs.com/ http://www.styluslabs.com/
  - necovek 5y ago
    Not GP and I have no idea if they meant this, but "smart" vectorization/tracing would be ideal when use of touchscreen pens is impossible (still doesn't capture the angle a pen is being held at, but we are getting close). For the state of the art, look up "image tracing".
    - mxuribe 5y ago
      Thanks, I'll look up image tracing.
jdvh 5y ago
Plain text is so compelling because it's as simple as it gets, you can bring your own editor, you own your own data, and you can use version control. Text+ is compelling because you can have images and some kind of formatting. You want to store metadata and have backlinks and tags. Ideally with the possibility of collaborative editing. There should be a way to fuse these two.
- Geezus-42 5y ago
  The latter sounds like Obsidian or Logseq or most other markdown editors.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is wrestling with. The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's where it gets interesting. I used to set my students a question about information content in a class on the philosophy of procedural representation. We had a very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, and a short grainy video clip of her getting into a plane and smiling and waving. My question was: Which one of these two media conveys more information about Amelia? One gave extraordinary detail of her face, eyes, and seemed to many was a much better "fidelity" document. Others noticed that although you couldn't see her face in the video, you could feel from her gait, waving, body language and the way she shook hands _much more_ about her than from the static photo. Both files are the same size in bytes. So which one has more "information"? Which one is more "authentic"? Not to attempt to answer here with a deep dive into phenomenology, but each carries a different kind of information, which can be static, dynamic, or meta-dynamic in higher orders relative to a matrix of assumptions that must be carried forward in parallel by the culture that wants to decode the message later. I like that Miris tries to explore this by questioning the richness of text. But maybe the question doesn't hold up well under those conditions of investigation - because one might say that a great poet using only a few words might capture a landscape better than a painting, but if our culture drifts toward a visual one where poetry is no longer understood we cannot say that the medium itself degraded.
- Moru 5y ago
  A digital format needs to be as simple as possible. If you need a 1000 page long definition for the word document format to be able to get the information out of it, it's not really good for anything when the format is forgotten.
- aasasd 5y ago
  > very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart I thought photo quality was rather meh until the 50s or at least the 40s? Even with large films the results are often muddy in olden shots—while 70 mm movie film from the 60s will probably still be redigitized into super-duper-hd formats in the late 21st century (e.g. https://youtu.be/sCv-dIFGcd0 https://youtu.be/sCv-dIFGcd0).
thematrixadmin 5y ago
What about writing data in markdown format, physically on the HDD. You can use bunch of different both online and local tools which will probably stay supported in the future. There is also no problem with implementing your own markdown editor (nice side, pet project as well). I store and run small server on my RPi, accessible through my phone and desktop. If I'd like to show the text to somebody I can easily copy it as a plain text, Word format or export it to HTML or PDF.
orzig 5y ago
Render to ASCII, everyone wins! (e.g. https://ascii-generator.site/ https://ascii-generator.site/)
Annatar 5y ago
"This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html
eatmygodetia 5y ago
I feel like a lot of use plain text proponents forget that outside of ASCII and now UTF-8, lots of alleged plain text documents with diacritics or non-latin characters are at least slightly difficult to open because of their somewhat esoteric encodings. Plain text isn't as universal as it is often claimed, although it is immensely simpler than some other formats. But maybe we should all use monochrome bitmap files for everything? That would be very simple.
- smasher164 5y ago
  I think for a plaintext format to be "complete", it needs some mechanism of associating the language with some segment of text. Plaintext formats that don't acknowledge unified characters are just Latin-biased.
  - eatmygodetia 5y ago
    that's basically point - you can open an ascii file now because utf-8 is ascii oriented, but a utf-8 first editor will struggle with an old french text file for example. plain text has inbuilt biases which have changed over time, it's not as pure as simple as people say.
    - tombert 5y ago
      That's something I've always thought; plain text is pure and wonderful for me, an Anglo-writing American, because most of these formats were written for people like me. I suspect for nearly every other language (or at least any language that doesn't use the ~100 characters/symbols used in the English alphabet), old ASCII text isn't terribly useful.
- softwarebeware 5y ago
  Yes, I feel this in my bones as someone who previously worked for a text messaging provider. Plain text has the deceptive appearance of simplicity, but it is actually one of the most maddening things to get right, especially if you intend to support the accurate transmission of said text to any possible text message receiving device in the world.
a1445c8b 5y ago
s/comprise of/comprise/g
thomascgalvin 5y ago
This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more pedantic than I think it needs to be. I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand. The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible." Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you want to view those same photos when you're fifty years old, or seventy-five, you're better off storing them as a JPEG than a PSD, and you're better off storing them on a hard drive you have access to in addition to whatever cloud they're currently occupying. "Write plain text" is a shorthand for "use open formats." Because so much of what this audience does is test-based, plain text is the most common format we use, from source code to journaling, but that message applies to pretty much anything: if you lock yourself into a proprietary format, or a proprietary editor, you will almost certainly lose data over the long term.
- raman162 5y ago
  I got the same feeling as well. Open formats and avoiding proprietary lock-in is what the spirit of "write in plain text" is about.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    I took a different conclusion from the plain text article. The argument isn't about open formats, it's really about plain text, simply because there's no need to have a tool to make use of it. Even open formats can get abandoned and become unusable.
- freddie_mercury 5y ago
  I think you've over corrected too far in the other direction. "Write plain text" is definitely not a shorthand for "use open formats". PDF is an open format. Approximately nobody who says "write plain text" thinks putting everything in PDF is an acceptable alternative. They don't even want you writing in HTML, for that matter. They want Markdown. They really do mean something fairly close to "plain text".
dorfsmay 5y ago
Whenever choosing a markup, image format, or other technologies, keep the Lindy effect in mind. A boring technology that has been around for a long time will survive a lot longer and a brand new shiny one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
brians 5y ago
“all the binary formats of the 1990s can be opened today” Oh, sweet summer child. Scribe/mss. Koalapad. A bunch of Apple 2GS, Apple 3, and Lisa formats. Lotus Improv. The points about semantics and authenticity are wonderful, but I think the presumption that all formats can be opened is mistaken exactly because those that can’t be opened become effectively invisible and lost.
- mark-r 5y ago
  Survivorship bias it's called.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Emulation can bring them back in a limited fashion. Though obviously un-marrying them from the original system environment and making them accessible outside of the VM can be a challenge.
  - photojosh 5y ago
    This just gave me the completely random idea... (as someone whose parents used to have tons of ClarisWorks docs)... build OCR into the emulator. :)
highspeedbus 5y ago
Obsidian/Markdown file structure is great for this. It can become a standard to "Offline Hypertext" format. Despite text being fully portable, it is limited when it's needed to link a image or other files. People often forget how useful this concept is. Html is not a viable option as it is awfully verbose for taking simple a note. Markdown adds just enough semantics that is perfectly readable. From a hex editor to Microsoft Word. We're in a somewhat critical moment, where markdown can either stay as it is, then dominate and become a godsend format of solid usability for decades, or a harmful feature is added that would slowly drag the whole thing down until the next Just Write Plain Text blog post.
jauco 5y ago
Real archivists (as in people that have archivist as a job description and work at places that have “storing data forever” as a mission statement) tend to store the data in multiple formats. The source + a few derivations. They also store a bunch of copies to ward against bitrot. And they periodically compare the copies. Real archivists use a lot of data :)
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  I think part of the job of an "archivist" archivist (as opposed to an amateur archivist), is making information accessible to others. For that, you need derivations, because nobody will necessarily know how to deploy a Mac OS 7 virtual machine, install Claris Works (or whatever it is), load the original file onto the machine, and then navigate the contemporary UI (with it's unusual conventions) to get at the information they wanted. For personal data, I already know how to get an old environment up and running, so I'm happy enough to keep multiple copies of the original and of any software I need to open it.
gandalfff 5y ago
Plain text is fine for some things but lacking for others. I like GUIs for formatting. I wouldn't be surprised if my ODTs could be opened a thousand years from now.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Betcha you'd be surprised to be around to find out, though.
jjice 5y ago
We use Google Docs for pretty much all of our docs since they're easy to create, share, and modify, and it works pretty well. I just (selfishly) want a good integrated plain text editor as part of GSuite. Sharing code via Google Docs isn't great, and sometimes I don't want to think about headers and formatting, I just want to use tabs to separate my pieces. That said, I'm definitely in the minority of users and I'll deal with it, not that big of a deal.
titzer 5y ago
> What ultimately matters is that information is captured and preserved as thoroughly as possible. Between a picture that expresses a thousand words, and plain text file that sacrifices its detail and authenticity, why wouldn't we choose the former? Indeed, this question applies even the choice may sacrifice the longevity. What's the point of longevity, when the pursuit of it can compromise our ability to capture the information we may be afraid of possibly losing? I would contend that capturing a picture is absolutely a massive distortion of reality because reality is three dimensional, exists in many spectra beyond visible light, has sounds, smells, taste, and feeling, and exists in a historical context. The selection of framing, distance, focus, all of these are biases of the photographer. A photo is a lie, too. Just because it's higher resolution doesn't mean it has indeed captured the right information. Text is a lie too, granted. But in our current digitization zeitgeist, we have forgotten that our media (pictures, video, recordings, not just the TV, cable, and internet) lie to us. Our own bias towards slicing apart the world into computer-digestible bits is just us lying more convincingly to ourselves.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  By that definition, using literally any point of view to capture, measure or describe information is a lie. I take issue with that. This is stripping the word "lie" from it's time-honoured meaning (~"distorting or fabricating truths to influence decision making or perception"), and dilutes it for when we actually need to call out lies.
happyglands 5y ago
I've struggled with this for quite some time now, and tried almost every tool out there. At the moment, I'm settling with Bear, writing my notes in Markdown. I prefer the ease of using nvAlt but I need the ability to store images and PDFs and I like the fact that it has some very nice export options should I eventually move to another tool, so I don't feel like I'm "locked in".
briandoll 5y ago
I assume this is a response to Derek Sivers post: Write Plain Text Files https://sive.rs/plaintext https://sive.rs/plaintext I've been using computers daily for about 35 years now and I have a _lot_ of plain text files that I regularly use -- notes, lists, outlines, quotes, links, etc. Does anyone who has been around a while, have a large multi-decade collection of texts that are _not_ plain text? What formats do you use? How do you maintain access to those files over time?
- paxys 5y ago
  My MP3 collection has been going on for at least 25 years and still works perfectly. Same for HTML pages (I have entire websites backed up from the early 90s). I still have Wordstar and Word 1.0 files which I can open and edit. I can't think of too many pieces of software or data formats from the last 30-40 years which achieved some threshold of popularity but have no support today.
  - jjav 5y ago
    > My MP3 collection has been going on for at least 25 years and still works perfectly. Mine as well (maybe not quite 25 but close). But music isn't written word, clearly it wouldn't be in an ASCII text file. The key is universal, non-proprietary formats that are supported by thousands of open source applications. Those are the formats that will last a lifetime and beyond. So, plain text for the written word (HTML counts as plain text, you can read and write it in any plain text editor), JPG for pictures, MP3 for music. For video there doesn't seem to be an answer that is fully satisfactory, that I feel confident I can still view in 50 years. So I mostly take photos, not much video, since I can't trust the longevity of video.
  - briandoll 5y ago
    MP3 is a good one. Although I had to develop a lot of perl to manage the various incantations of ID3 tags, especially when VBR became popular. MP3 files may still play, but the full experience (properly attributed w/ band, album, song title, song number, album art, etc.) is likely less than perfect over time. Do Wordstar files open in modern Word applications, even on iOS? That's part of the access aspect over the long term -- files that can be used, everyday, with your daily-driver tools with minimal special software needed.
davbryn1 5y ago
"Prioritising the longevity of data can sacrifice the authenticity of what it tries to capture and preserve. When I say authenticity, I refer to how accurate and detailed the data in question preserves a particular state. An original raw image, for example, will capture a landscape much more authentically than written text would. Written text will inevitably comprise of ambiguity and even bias, if not distortion." Or, you need to become a better writer.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  There's a reason why it's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. There are trade-offs, and at the end of the day some things are more efficiently described in text, and some visually.
quasarj 5y ago
Wrote a whole article about not using plain text. Used plain text for everything except a useless image. A+++
writegit 5y ago
Or both? I have a daemon that watches for binary changes in writing documents. If changes are identified then it runs: $ libreoffice --headless --convert-to txt <CHANGED_FILES> Then commits the plaintext to a git repo. Allows for diffs, text search, and "longevity" across "authentic" docs.
dang 5y ago
Related large thread from yesterday: Write plain text files - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 - March 2022 (345 comments)
chaxor 5y ago
I like the idea of making a binary file into a plaintext file - but you could store it as the ASCII characters "0000110100111011110001111100101..." This would be great for many reasons. At the top of that list for example, is getting a lot more use out of those hard drives you paid for.
nicbou 5y ago
There doesn't need to be a compromise. You can have both if you keep your data in multiple formats. Storage is cheap and text files are small. My timeline thing [0] keeps the original archives, stores the timeline entries in a database, and exports them hourly as JSON + files. If the code stops working or the database crashes, the files are still there. The automated backups are there too. No information is lost. However, the richness is not lost in the process. This timeline has geolocation history, notebook scans and a bunch of other things that don't really translate to plain text. The most important difference is that I can write to my timeline from my phone. Managing text files across devices is quite troublesome by comparison. If I want plain text out of it, I can write a new Destination that pipes entries to plain text files or to a fax machine. [0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline
m348e912 5y ago
This might be off topic but in terms of communication such as email, plain text seems the most authentic format to me. For example, if you are one of those sales guys that bolds and highlights the important parts of an email that you send, it's off-putting. The only exception I would give is if you wanted to add an inline image or an emoji -- everything else, plain text.
Beldin 5y ago
It seems the author overlooked the possibility of writing out the full binary string of whatever format he'd like (i.e., "zero one one ..."), prefaced by instructions on how to parse that. That would give you great "authenticity" (in his definition) and great longevity. Not practical for reading back, but that was not the point. With the help of a few simple scripts, writing is easy. So, in the end, not really an argument against storing information exclusively in plaintext.
aaron695 5y ago

138 points by yumiris 5y ago

ggm 5y ago

he said.. in courier, monospaced paragraphs format, morally as close to "plaintext" as you can be with a couple of diagrams which could have been ASCII art...

lbriner 5y ago
Exactly. The OP said what they needed to in plain text because it captures what they wanted to say in the simplest format. If they had needed to convey an image or contextual information like some rich API spec, they would presumably have used something else.
kleiba 5y ago
That is not a contradiction. The OP is just arguing that you should use the best medium + format for the job - and sometimes simple text is sufficient (as it says in the article).
ciphol 5y ago
Ironically, the "pro plain text" link posted earlier used lots of formatting. I don't see why pure plain text is better in any way than plain text with formatting, like a simplified form of HTML (<a>, , , some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text. Images have their own value, as do animations and video on occasion. Here matters become more complicated - image formats are generally non-human-readable and non-diffable (though SVG or a similar format could solve those problems for schematic-type images) and image conversions generally involve data loss. For starters, though, one should at least use a non-proprietary format for images and video.
- alanbernstein 5y ago
 As the pro-plain-text post said: HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.
 - ciphol 5y ago
 It depends. XML is generally not human-readable, it's got way too much programming code in relation to the amount of human content. But a simple subset of HTML is definitely human-readable.
 - mro_name 5y ago
 No, not when it comes to what reading person they target. Here text/plain is the only that works for e.g. my mother.
- b112 5y ago
 like a simplified form of HTML (<a>, , , some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text. Yes, but, the problem isn't typically being proprietary, when it comes to future use, but a closed, non standard, unknown format. Yet you're creating a new standard here, with your own rules, which no one will understand, and which no automated tools can convert to another format. (Eg some kind of table formatting) Better to be 100% html than this. (Maybe you meant that, but regardless, this is a good place for me to comment on standards being more important than anything else.)
 - mro_name 5y ago
 > no one will understand that's a bit harsh. And frankly, I don't understand 100% english either, but still we use it to communicate.
 - b112 5y ago
 The point isn't that you can learn it, but instead, having to learn it by examining it in depth, always wondering if there are things not used yet (does the doc you look at, only show part of the standard in its formatting? Imagine a doc not using a tag, but the tag is in other docs...), and then, writing code to covert it. Standards exist for a reason. We already have issues with people not understanding specs, and writing data out of spec, even with that spec in RFC's!
 - mro_name 5y ago
 my favourite is the spec that was changed after the fact: Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339#section-5.6 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339#section-5.6 But what harm does it to restrict oneself to a few html tags?
gwern 5y ago
And if the diagrams had been ASCII art diagrams (eg https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/1498541884796542977 https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/1498541884796542977 ), OP could fix the typo in the diagram with a keystroke.
- yumiris 5y ago
  Cheers for the heads-up on the typo. The diagram's an SVG, with the labels being in plain ASCII. One keystroke is all it took indeed! :P On the serious side, ASCII art diagrams are splendid and I very often use them myself, though they can get quite complex and thus messy to maintain. There comes a certain point where they lose their simplicity, sadly.

llarsson 5y ago

That "some" proprietary formats from the 80's and 90's are still readable is already causing real problems: because not *all* are. So text, possibly with Markdown or similar hints regarding emphasis and structure, is still vastly better than any alternative I can think of.

c0balt 5y ago
Additionally the option to (relatively) easily transform markdown or richtext to another format is a great when you want to try a new tool and/or format.
- eddieroger 5y ago
  That's the real secret, I think, keeping content up to date. Text isn't the only medium that can be treated that way, too. My family converted lots of analog audio and video tapes to DVD some years ago, and I immediately turned around and ripped them to digital, lossless types and stored them on a few hard drives and eventually a cloud backup. Will FLAC and MP4 last forever? Nope, probably not, but if I check in on these files every few years, update the players that I've saved (VLC), and periodically convert them to newer formats, I feel comfortable that my grandchildren will be able to hear their great-great-grandparents' road trip to California, or see video of my bar mitzvah on whatever screen they're using years from now.
  - nayuki 5y ago
    Nitpick - DVD is digital. When you said "digital", you probably meant "computer file based" format, as opposed to a physical disc format. Similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682996
sleepycatgirl 5y ago
Yup. Or .org for that matter,
dhosek 5y ago
I bumped into this recently with a couple Kodak PhotoCDs I uncovered last month. Trying to get the pictures out of the PCD files is turning out to be more challenging than I expected.

anotherevan 5y ago

Reminds me of the Einstein quote: Make something as simple as possible, but no more so. Paraphrased: Make your information capture format as simple as possible, but no more so.

yumiris 5y ago

This was concocted at 5AM -- my apologies for any peculiar sentence structures or odd phrasing. Will re-re-re-revise it again with fresh eyes after resting 'em!

copperx 5y ago

> but dismissing or abandoning media files is a much more guaranteed potential loss of information – information which plain text cannot capture due to its limitations. Some examples are sorely needed. How is a Word/InDesign file more authentic than a plain text file? Or is the author talking about media? Is a ProTools session more authentic than Wav files?

lallysingh 5y ago
I've read some docs with ASCII art diagrams far more complex than the medium really allowed. I would have preferred PDF/A
coldtea 5y ago
>Is a ProTools session more authentic than Wav files? Dunno about 'authentic', but since the part you've quoted specifically talks about "loss of information", the WAV files indeed incur loss of information compared to a ProTools session. E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss all the individual channels, for starters. If it's multiple wav files with all the channels as stems, it will still miss the effect chain settings (and hardcode them in the final result), the MIDI notes (hardcoded as the rendered VST output), session markers, tempo change tracks, and other such things.
- falcolas 5y ago
  > E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss all the individual channels, for starters. A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what does make it from the notes to the book, and how it's changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it doesn't also come with all the author's notes. So, if it's not in the final mix, it's because it's not supposed to be in the final mix; it's not that the data is lost because of technical limitations. And like notes from a book, unless you throw them away, they're not going anywhere. On a more technical note, underneath the hood, the recorded items are all stored as .wav files too...
  - 5y ago

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ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago

I think longevity is not just an issue of the data format but more so of its organization. It so happens that text files organized using the file system is the most easily producible, maintainable and queryable data organization tool. But other media can have the same properties if they're organized using the file system rather than any complex tools. I have graphs and datasheets that have endured decades that I refer to often and are easily findable because they are well-named files in well-named folders, even though the formats are comparatively much more complex.

aasasd 5y ago

I got quite a lot of use out of metadata over the years, such that now I'll probably get a nervous itch and tremors all over my body if I attempt to use just plain text. Specifically, the creation and modification times for each addition to my notes are rather valuable, especially with the work-from-home lifestyle aka ‘day fades into night into day’—with which more people are gonna be familiarized in these years. Thankfully I'm using Org-mode these days, which is reasonably ‘plain text’ under practical definitions—but I make dozens new headings every week, and each of them is stamped with the creation time. But boy do I miss having modification times too—should probably finally set up automatic commits to Git. Also need to mess with Orgzly so that it marks notes that are created on the phone.

ParetoOptimal 5y ago
What are some things you use modification times for?
- aasasd 5y ago
  When I used Evernote and my notes were larger in scale, I mostly used the modification time to figure out how long a particular note was lying around without updates—so abandoned-forgotten projects and such stuff, basically tracking how much I actually use the notes. (Evernote went to shit over the years, so don't take this as an endorsement.) Sometimes it's also useful to figure out what I was doing when writing a note, by placing the time among my other activities. This gives some context for the thoughts. Now that I migrated to outlines and the notes are much more granular, plus I started making more of them—they can often serve as a timestamped log of my day. When did I eat the breakfast—so I can put the dinner in the stomach before it begins an acid-fest? Well, I logged watching an episode of the series during the breakfast, so the creation time tells me the answer. I'm scatterbrained, okay. Or rather, the notes are part of my ‘brain’ now. In fact, I do miss granular times in other logs of my activity—ironically, in regard to privacy. I watched a video on a particular topic around last summer, and would like to find it now—but YT's ‘watch history’ is crude and just leafing through all of it is infeasible. (Actually, perhaps I should look into the ‘takeout’ dumps of activity for the timestamps, and make a list of the vids in a better format.)

VariableStar 5y ago

IMO the question is more about which standards are used, rather than specifying an specific format. In particular, using open and free standards and formats increases the chance to retrieve and use data after long time storage. Different formats suit different data types.

amiga1200 5y ago

The Epic of Gilgamesh was written in plain text.

wl 5y ago
In a complicated, undocumented format that had to be reverse-engineered (Sumerian/Akkadian/Hittite cuneiform).
- CRConrad 5y ago
  And those clay tablets were all craggly-surfaced and far too thick to fit in my DVD player! Shabby archivists, those Babylonians.

dade_ 5y ago

MD for all things text and SVG journals for handwritten notes, diagrams, sketches, screenshots. Works great, but haven’t found a way to integrate them beyond using a common set of folders.

mxuribe 5y ago
> ...SVG journals for handwritten... Would you kindly clarify this? Did you mean scan in handwritten material but save it in a scalable image format like SVG? I'm quite interested but maybe i'm not capturing what you mean here, because i have not had my breakfast. :-)
- dade_ 5y ago
  I use Write (iPad/Windows/Ubuntu/Android) to take handwritten notes and jot info. I first started using SVG on my Sony eReader, it used this vector format. http://www.styluslabs.com/ http://www.styluslabs.com/
- necovek 5y ago
  Not GP and I have no idea if they meant this, but "smart" vectorization/tracing would be ideal when use of touchscreen pens is impossible (still doesn't capture the angle a pen is being held at, but we are getting close). For the state of the art, look up "image tracing".
  - mxuribe 5y ago
    Thanks, I'll look up image tracing.

jdvh 5y ago

Plain text is so compelling because it's as simple as it gets, you can bring your own editor, you own your own data, and you can use version control. Text+ is compelling because you can have images and some kind of formatting. You want to store metadata and have backlinks and tags. Ideally with the possibility of collaborative editing. There should be a way to fuse these two.

Geezus-42 5y ago
The latter sounds like Obsidian or Logseq or most other markdown editors.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

This essay is actually deeper than its surface appearance, about text versus other formats. It's about semantics and richness of content, although I am not sure Miris fully grasps what s/he is wrestling with. The author invokes the concept of "authenticity", and that's where it gets interesting. I used to set my students a question about information content in a class on the philosophy of procedural representation. We had a very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, and a short grainy video clip of her getting into a plane and smiling and waving. My question was: Which one of these two media conveys more information about Amelia? One gave extraordinary detail of her face, eyes, and seemed to many was a much better "fidelity" document. Others noticed that although you couldn't see her face in the video, you could feel from her gait, waving, body language and the way she shook hands _much more_ about her than from the static photo. Both files are the same size in bytes. So which one has more "information"? Which one is more "authentic"? Not to attempt to answer here with a deep dive into phenomenology, but each carries a different kind of information, which can be static, dynamic, or meta-dynamic in higher orders relative to a matrix of assumptions that must be carried forward in parallel by the culture that wants to decode the message later. I like that Miris tries to explore this by questioning the richness of text. But maybe the question doesn't hold up well under those conditions of investigation - because one might say that a great poet using only a few words might capture a landscape better than a painting, but if our culture drifts toward a visual one where poetry is no longer understood we cannot say that the medium itself degraded.

Moru 5y ago
A digital format needs to be as simple as possible. If you need a 1000 page long definition for the word document format to be able to get the information out of it, it's not really good for anything when the format is forgotten.
aasasd 5y ago
> very high resolution photo of the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart I thought photo quality was rather meh until the 50s or at least the 40s? Even with large films the results are often muddy in olden shots—while 70 mm movie film from the 60s will probably still be redigitized into super-duper-hd formats in the late 21st century (e.g. https://youtu.be/sCv-dIFGcd0 https://youtu.be/sCv-dIFGcd0).

thematrixadmin 5y ago

What about writing data in markdown format, physically on the HDD. You can use bunch of different both online and local tools which will probably stay supported in the future. There is also no problem with implementing your own markdown editor (nice side, pet project as well). I store and run small server on my RPi, accessible through my phone and desktop. If I'd like to show the text to somebody I can easily copy it as a plain text, Word format or export it to HTML or PDF.

orzig 5y ago

Render to ASCII, everyone wins! (e.g. https://ascii-generator.site/ https://ascii-generator.site/)

Annatar 5y ago

"This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface." http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

eatmygodetia 5y ago

I feel like a lot of use plain text proponents forget that outside of ASCII and now UTF-8, lots of alleged plain text documents with diacritics or non-latin characters are at least slightly difficult to open because of their somewhat esoteric encodings. Plain text isn't as universal as it is often claimed, although it is immensely simpler than some other formats. But maybe we should all use monochrome bitmap files for everything? That would be very simple.

smasher164 5y ago
I think for a plaintext format to be "complete", it needs some mechanism of associating the language with some segment of text. Plaintext formats that don't acknowledge unified characters are just Latin-biased.
- eatmygodetia 5y ago
  that's basically point - you can open an ascii file now because utf-8 is ascii oriented, but a utf-8 first editor will struggle with an old french text file for example. plain text has inbuilt biases which have changed over time, it's not as pure as simple as people say.
  - tombert 5y ago
    That's something I've always thought; plain text is pure and wonderful for me, an Anglo-writing American, because most of these formats were written for people like me. I suspect for nearly every other language (or at least any language that doesn't use the ~100 characters/symbols used in the English alphabet), old ASCII text isn't terribly useful.
softwarebeware 5y ago
Yes, I feel this in my bones as someone who previously worked for a text messaging provider. Plain text has the deceptive appearance of simplicity, but it is actually one of the most maddening things to get right, especially if you intend to support the accurate transmission of said text to any possible text message receiving device in the world.

a1445c8b 5y ago

s/comprise of/comprise/g

thomascgalvin 5y ago

This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more pedantic than I think it needs to be. I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand. The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible." Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you want to view those same photos when you're fifty years old, or seventy-five, you're better off storing them as a JPEG than a PSD, and you're better off storing them on a hard drive you have access to in addition to whatever cloud they're currently occupying. "Write plain text" is a shorthand for "use open formats." Because so much of what this audience does is test-based, plain text is the most common format we use, from source code to journaling, but that message applies to pretty much anything: if you lock yourself into a proprietary format, or a proprietary editor, you will almost certainly lose data over the long term.

raman162 5y ago
I got the same feeling as well. Open formats and avoiding proprietary lock-in is what the spirit of "write in plain text" is about.
- mark-r 5y ago
  I took a different conclusion from the plain text article. The argument isn't about open formats, it's really about plain text, simply because there's no need to have a tool to make use of it. Even open formats can get abandoned and become unusable.
freddie_mercury 5y ago
I think you've over corrected too far in the other direction. "Write plain text" is definitely not a shorthand for "use open formats". PDF is an open format. Approximately nobody who says "write plain text" thinks putting everything in PDF is an acceptable alternative. They don't even want you writing in HTML, for that matter. They want Markdown. They really do mean something fairly close to "plain text".

dorfsmay 5y ago

Whenever choosing a markup, image format, or other technologies, keep the Lindy effect in mind. A boring technology that has been around for a long time will survive a lot longer and a brand new shiny one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

brians 5y ago

“all the binary formats of the 1990s can be opened today” Oh, sweet summer child. Scribe/mss. Koalapad. A bunch of Apple 2GS, Apple 3, and Lisa formats. Lotus Improv. The points about semantics and authenticity are wonderful, but I think the presumption that all formats can be opened is mistaken exactly because those that can’t be opened become effectively invisible and lost.

mark-r 5y ago
Survivorship bias it's called.
selfhoster11 5y ago
Emulation can bring them back in a limited fashion. Though obviously un-marrying them from the original system environment and making them accessible outside of the VM can be a challenge.
- photojosh 5y ago
  This just gave me the completely random idea... (as someone whose parents used to have tons of ClarisWorks docs)... build OCR into the emulator. :)

highspeedbus 5y ago

Obsidian/Markdown file structure is great for this. It can become a standard to "Offline Hypertext" format. Despite text being fully portable, it is limited when it's needed to link a image or other files. People often forget how useful this concept is. Html is not a viable option as it is awfully verbose for taking simple a note. Markdown adds just enough semantics that is perfectly readable. From a hex editor to Microsoft Word. We're in a somewhat critical moment, where markdown can either stay as it is, then dominate and become a godsend format of solid usability for decades, or a harmful feature is added that would slowly drag the whole thing down until the next Just Write Plain Text blog post.

jauco 5y ago

Real archivists (as in people that have archivist as a job description and work at places that have “storing data forever” as a mission statement) tend to store the data in multiple formats. The source + a few derivations. They also store a bunch of copies to ward against bitrot. And they periodically compare the copies. Real archivists use a lot of data :)

selfhoster11 5y ago
I think part of the job of an "archivist" archivist (as opposed to an amateur archivist), is making information accessible to others. For that, you need derivations, because nobody will necessarily know how to deploy a Mac OS 7 virtual machine, install Claris Works (or whatever it is), load the original file onto the machine, and then navigate the contemporary UI (with it's unusual conventions) to get at the information they wanted. For personal data, I already know how to get an old environment up and running, so I'm happy enough to keep multiple copies of the original and of any software I need to open it.

gandalfff 5y ago

Plain text is fine for some things but lacking for others. I like GUIs for formatting. I wouldn't be surprised if my ODTs could be opened a thousand years from now.

CRConrad 5y ago
Betcha you'd be surprised to be around to find out, though.

jjice 5y ago

We use Google Docs for pretty much all of our docs since they're easy to create, share, and modify, and it works pretty well. I just (selfishly) want a good integrated plain text editor as part of GSuite. Sharing code via Google Docs isn't great, and sometimes I don't want to think about headers and formatting, I just want to use tabs to separate my pieces. That said, I'm definitely in the minority of users and I'll deal with it, not that big of a deal.

titzer 5y ago

> What ultimately matters is that information is captured and preserved as thoroughly as possible. Between a picture that expresses a thousand words, and plain text file that sacrifices its detail and authenticity, why wouldn't we choose the former? Indeed, this question applies even the choice may sacrifice the longevity. What's the point of longevity, when the pursuit of it can compromise our ability to capture the information we may be afraid of possibly losing? I would contend that capturing a picture is absolutely a massive distortion of reality because reality is three dimensional, exists in many spectra beyond visible light, has sounds, smells, taste, and feeling, and exists in a historical context. The selection of framing, distance, focus, all of these are biases of the photographer. A photo is a lie, too. Just because it's higher resolution doesn't mean it has indeed captured the right information. Text is a lie too, granted. But in our current digitization zeitgeist, we have forgotten that our media (pictures, video, recordings, not just the TV, cable, and internet) lie to us. Our own bias towards slicing apart the world into computer-digestible bits is just us lying more convincingly to ourselves.

selfhoster11 5y ago
By that definition, using literally any point of view to capture, measure or describe information is a lie. I take issue with that. This is stripping the word "lie" from it's time-honoured meaning (~"distorting or fabricating truths to influence decision making or perception"), and dilutes it for when we actually need to call out lies.

happyglands 5y ago

I've struggled with this for quite some time now, and tried almost every tool out there. At the moment, I'm settling with Bear, writing my notes in Markdown. I prefer the ease of using nvAlt but I need the ability to store images and PDFs and I like the fact that it has some very nice export options should I eventually move to another tool, so I don't feel like I'm "locked in".

briandoll 5y ago

I assume this is a response to Derek Sivers post: Write Plain Text Files https://sive.rs/plaintext https://sive.rs/plaintext I've been using computers daily for about 35 years now and I have a _lot_ of plain text files that I regularly use -- notes, lists, outlines, quotes, links, etc. Does anyone who has been around a while, have a large multi-decade collection of texts that are _not_ plain text? What formats do you use? How do you maintain access to those files over time?

paxys 5y ago
My MP3 collection has been going on for at least 25 years and still works perfectly. Same for HTML pages (I have entire websites backed up from the early 90s). I still have Wordstar and Word 1.0 files which I can open and edit. I can't think of too many pieces of software or data formats from the last 30-40 years which achieved some threshold of popularity but have no support today.
- jjav 5y ago
  > My MP3 collection has been going on for at least 25 years and still works perfectly. Mine as well (maybe not quite 25 but close). But music isn't written word, clearly it wouldn't be in an ASCII text file. The key is universal, non-proprietary formats that are supported by thousands of open source applications. Those are the formats that will last a lifetime and beyond. So, plain text for the written word (HTML counts as plain text, you can read and write it in any plain text editor), JPG for pictures, MP3 for music. For video there doesn't seem to be an answer that is fully satisfactory, that I feel confident I can still view in 50 years. So I mostly take photos, not much video, since I can't trust the longevity of video.
- briandoll 5y ago
  MP3 is a good one. Although I had to develop a lot of perl to manage the various incantations of ID3 tags, especially when VBR became popular. MP3 files may still play, but the full experience (properly attributed w/ band, album, song title, song number, album art, etc.) is likely less than perfect over time. Do Wordstar files open in modern Word applications, even on iOS? That's part of the access aspect over the long term -- files that can be used, everyday, with your daily-driver tools with minimal special software needed.

davbryn1 5y ago

"Prioritising the longevity of data can sacrifice the authenticity of what it tries to capture and preserve. When I say authenticity, I refer to how accurate and detailed the data in question preserves a particular state. An original raw image, for example, will capture a landscape much more authentically than written text would. Written text will inevitably comprise of ambiguity and even bias, if not distortion." Or, you need to become a better writer.

selfhoster11 5y ago
There's a reason why it's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. There are trade-offs, and at the end of the day some things are more efficiently described in text, and some visually.

quasarj 5y ago

Wrote a whole article about not using plain text. Used plain text for everything except a useless image. A+++

writegit 5y ago

Or both? I have a daemon that watches for binary changes in writing documents. If changes are identified then it runs: $ libreoffice --headless --convert-to txt <CHANGED_FILES> Then commits the plaintext to a git repo. Allows for diffs, text search, and "longevity" across "authentic" docs.

dang 5y ago

Related large thread from yesterday: Write plain text files - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 - March 2022 (345 comments)

chaxor 5y ago

I like the idea of making a binary file into a plaintext file - but you could store it as the ASCII characters "0000110100111011110001111100101..." This would be great for many reasons. At the top of that list for example, is getting a lot more use out of those hard drives you paid for.

nicbou 5y ago

There doesn't need to be a compromise. You can have both if you keep your data in multiple formats. Storage is cheap and text files are small. My timeline thing [0] keeps the original archives, stores the timeline entries in a database, and exports them hourly as JSON + files. If the code stops working or the database crashes, the files are still there. The automated backups are there too. No information is lost. However, the richness is not lost in the process. This timeline has geolocation history, notebook scans and a bunch of other things that don't really translate to plain text. The most important difference is that I can write to my timeline from my phone. Managing text files across devices is quite troublesome by comparison. If I want plain text out of it, I can write a new Destination that pipes entries to plain text files or to a fax machine. [0] https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline

m348e912 5y ago

This might be off topic but in terms of communication such as email, plain text seems the most authentic format to me. For example, if you are one of those sales guys that bolds and highlights the important parts of an email that you send, it's off-putting. The only exception I would give is if you wanted to add an inline image or an emoji -- everything else, plain text.

Beldin 5y ago

It seems the author overlooked the possibility of writing out the full binary string of whatever format he'd like (i.e., "zero one one ..."), prefaced by instructions on how to parse that. That would give you great "authenticity" (in his definition) and great longevity. Not practical for reading back, but that was not the point. With the help of a few simple scripts, writing is easy. So, in the end, not really an argument against storing information exclusively in plaintext.

aaron695 5y ago