8 ms·

Great cautionary tale about how quickly formats get obsolete, especially closed source ones. I use markdown, plaintext and png for all the documents I need to

Great cautionary tale about how quickly formats get obsolete, especially closed source ones. I use markdown, plaintext and png for all the documents I need to store long term. Even if these formats disappear, I could trivially reimplement my own parser.

ComputerGuru 3y ago
Isn’t markdown plaintext? (I didn’t downvote.)
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Isn’t HTML plaintext? ;)
  - ComputerGuru 3y ago
    Yes, but not intended to be directly human readable by contrast.
    - Narishma 3y ago
      If it wasn't intended to be human readable it would have been a binary format.
      - robinsonb5 3y ago
        It may have been intended to be human readable, but it failed dismally in that goal. Even before the web turned into the javascript infested swamp that is now, the tags having the same visual weight as the text they enclose made it tiring to read. Markdown's genius is in the formatting tags being almost no hindrance to readability.
        williamcotton 3y ago
        I definitely agree that Markdown is more readable than markup, but personally I abhor what some frameworks do to HTML. I make sure my HTML is legible! There is even a benefit when it comes to hyperlinks in that you can see the URL!
elzbardico 3y ago
As a society we should have been thinking more about digital preservation since the time we started eschewing archiving hard copies in paper. People who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, but how can our future generations learn from our mistakes if all our documents are unreadable or lost by their time?
- zokier 3y ago
  Are you just casually dismissing all the work that digital archivists have done over the past couple of decades? https://www.loc.gov/librarians/standards https://www.loc.gov/librarians/standards https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/ https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/ https://www.loc.gov/programs/digital-collections-management/about-this-program/ https://www.loc.gov/programs/digital-collections-management/... and that's just Library of Congress, they are hardly alone in this field
kragen 3y ago
implementing a markdown parser is far from trivial implementing a parser that tricks people into believing it parses markdown because it acts like a markdown parser in simple cases is what is trivial it's likely that your markdown data will indeed be recoverable, but if you're generating it yourself, html is probably safer
- arnaudsm 3y ago
  Parsing markdown is multiple orders of magnitude easier than Microsoft Word, especially before docx. And it has the merit to be human-readable in plaintext!
  - kragen 3y ago
    that's probably true
- jprete 3y ago
  But the Markdown document doesn't actually need a parser to still be usable. Markdown as a whole imitates the conventions of typed text. The table formats would even be usable on an old typewriter.
  - kragen 3y ago
    markdown doesn't have tables, although you can include html <table> tags in it. perhaps you mean indented fixed-width blocks you can use for ascii art or typewriter-style tables?
    - kelnos 3y ago
      Sure it does. It may not be in the original standard, but many/most parsers support tables that use pipe characters to separate columns. And regardless, markdown documents -- including the table extension -- are readable without a parser.
      - 3y ago
mnw21cam 3y ago
The problem with markdown is that if you want to convert it to a formatted set of pages, the output will differ based on the version of your markdown converter. Similarly for HTML and also for plaintext to an extent. A PDF should remain exactly the same forever, but AFAIK the only properly editable document type that really keeps exactly the same formatting over time with updated software releases is TeX/LaTeX. In fact, that is a guarantee - if a LaTeX version doesn't produce exactly the same layout as a previous version for the same input document, it's officially a bug.
zzo38computer 3y ago
For such reasons, I think it is a good idea to use plain ASCII text format to document protocols and file formats as much as possible. (It is especially a problem if the documentation of a more complicated format or protocol requires use of that format or protocol itself.) There is also Just Solve The File Format Problem wiki (which I have added stuff to), although it uses HTML, and does not include full specifications for all file formats (but it does for some of them), and in some cases are links to external files, but it is helpful to find information about file formats anyways.

ComputerGuru 3y ago

Isn’t markdown plaintext? (I didn’t downvote.)

williamcotton 3y ago
Isn’t HTML plaintext? ;)
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  Yes, but not intended to be directly human readable by contrast.
  - Narishma 3y ago
    If it wasn't intended to be human readable it would have been a binary format.
    - robinsonb5 3y ago
      It may have been intended to be human readable, but it failed dismally in that goal. Even before the web turned into the javascript infested swamp that is now, the tags having the same visual weight as the text they enclose made it tiring to read. Markdown's genius is in the formatting tags being almost no hindrance to readability.
      - williamcotton 3y ago
        I definitely agree that Markdown is more readable than markup, but personally I abhor what some frameworks do to HTML. I make sure my HTML is legible! There is even a benefit when it comes to hyperlinks in that you can see the URL!

elzbardico 3y ago

As a society we should have been thinking more about digital preservation since the time we started eschewing archiving hard copies in paper. People who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, but how can our future generations learn from our mistakes if all our documents are unreadable or lost by their time?

zokier 3y ago
Are you just casually dismissing all the work that digital archivists have done over the past couple of decades? https://www.loc.gov/librarians/standards https://www.loc.gov/librarians/standards https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/ https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/ https://www.loc.gov/programs/digital-collections-management/about-this-program/ https://www.loc.gov/programs/digital-collections-management/... and that's just Library of Congress, they are hardly alone in this field

kragen 3y ago

implementing a markdown parser is far from trivial implementing a parser that tricks people into believing it parses markdown because it acts like a markdown parser in simple cases is what is trivial it's likely that your markdown data will indeed be recoverable, but if you're generating it yourself, html is probably safer

arnaudsm 3y ago
Parsing markdown is multiple orders of magnitude easier than Microsoft Word, especially before docx. And it has the merit to be human-readable in plaintext!
- kragen 3y ago
  that's probably true
jprete 3y ago
But the Markdown document doesn't actually need a parser to still be usable. Markdown as a whole imitates the conventions of typed text. The table formats would even be usable on an old typewriter.
- kragen 3y ago
  markdown doesn't have tables, although you can include html <table> tags in it. perhaps you mean indented fixed-width blocks you can use for ascii art or typewriter-style tables?
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Sure it does. It may not be in the original standard, but many/most parsers support tables that use pipe characters to separate columns. And regardless, markdown documents -- including the table extension -- are readable without a parser.
    - 3y ago

mnw21cam 3y ago

The problem with markdown is that if you want to convert it to a formatted set of pages, the output will differ based on the version of your markdown converter. Similarly for HTML and also for plaintext to an extent. A PDF should remain exactly the same forever, but AFAIK the only properly editable document type that really keeps exactly the same formatting over time with updated software releases is TeX/LaTeX. In fact, that is a guarantee - if a LaTeX version doesn't produce exactly the same layout as a previous version for the same input document, it's officially a bug.

zzo38computer 3y ago

For such reasons, I think it is a good idea to use plain ASCII text format to document protocols and file formats as much as possible. (It is especially a problem if the documentation of a more complicated format or protocol requires use of that format or protocol itself.) There is also Just Solve The File Format Problem wiki (which I have added stuff to), although it uses HTML, and does not include full specifications for all file formats (but it does for some of them), and in some cases are links to external files, but it is helpful to find information about file formats anyways.