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I think the simple ASCII text file was the peak of universally applicable computing. It was a universal substrate for information. It wasn't a good fit for many
by mikewarot 5y ago
I think the simple ASCII text file was the peak of universally applicable computing. It was a universal substrate for information. It wasn't a good fit for many reasons, but almost everything could understand and deal with it.
We need a new substrate for richly formatted text, sound, images, video, etc. HTML isn't it, nor is RTF or DOCX, PDF, etc.
- Jonovono 5y agoHave you seen anything trying to fill that gap? What about markdown? Or s-expressions? ;p
- mikewarot 5y agoLike the choice of ASCII, no matter what gets picked, someone will have a problem with it. Also like EBCDIC/ASCII, no matter who gets there first, it might not win anyway, so just pick something that works for you, explain it well enough to implement it, and open source it when you're done, to increase the odds a bit. Like Ward Christensen did with Modem7, which became XMODEM, which became the Xmodem protocol.