15 ms·

Always bet on text

• cLeEOGPw 12y ago
  I guess I'll have to drop Blender and use text files to create 3D models, because some guy on the internet thinks that text is "the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period". If the point of the article was to trick people into clicking, then it succeeded in that I guess.
  • bliker 12y ago
    Maybe you should try http://www.openscad.org/ http://www.openscad.org/
• analog31 12y ago
  A couple more points about text: 1) In addition to being searchable, text lends itself to other forms of automated processing such as translation and text-to-speech for the vision impaired. 2) I'm prone to debilitating eyestrain headaches when I try to do any kind of graphical work on a computer, yet I can write text without looking at the screen.
  • dummyfellow 12y ago
    isn't it very temporary advantage, till couple of decade back text wasn't searchable, and in couple of decades images may be equally searchable. Also pictures commonly have universal meanings.
    • klez 12y ago
      > Also pictures commonly have universal meanings Not really. Here's a common example http://theblitzbit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/swastika.jpg http://theblitzbit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/swastika.j... This pictures means different things in different cultures. Something else http://www.ritex.it/images/20111116_A.jpg http://www.ritex.it/images/20111116_A.jpg Try asking a Chinese farmer what this is.
      • aestra 12y ago
        Try asking an American what this picture means - http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/2010/03/1_123125_2245632_2246167_2247195_100308_signs_exit_greentn.jpg http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/2010/03/1_123... Most people would know that means "exit" but in true American fashion the United States uses a different sign - http://www.oneskilladay.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Exit-sign.jpg http://www.oneskilladay.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Exit-... I gotta say it took me a long time abroad to figure out what the green running man sign meant.
• gear54rus 12y ago
  I tend to agree. Yet human thoughts are presented in the form of pictures (dreams? you don't really see text in front of you when dreaming). It's one thing that a computer cannot make sense of 4000 bytes of a tweeting bird, but human brain instantly recognizes the rendered sign. Also, videos and music are very hard to describe in text: it just does not have this unique feel video or music piece does.
  • troymc 12y ago
    Perhaps the tweeting bird could get its own Unicode character code. Then it would compress nicely (because the details of how to render it would be passed along to the font files).
    • devindotcom 12y ago
      🐤
  • tjradcliffe 12y ago
    Videos described in text are called "stories". Imagine a technology that can create a present experience in the user's brain that engages all the senses and evokes a dream-like state of being there... that technology is called "text" (that's a loose paraphrase of someone in the interactive fiction community, though I can't remember who.) Music, I will grant you (mostly), but text really is an unbelievably powerful, flexible medium. It can't do everything, and everything it can do requires a certain amount of work on the reader's part and a huge amount of work on the writer's. The remarkable thing about text is it allows us to tame and control our dreams. We don't dream in text, but we can use text to evoke waking dreams. We can be in Mirkwood or on the slopes of Mount Doom in a way that mere video can't compare with.
    • dijit 12y ago
      How do you search a video anyway? assuming there was no text medium.
      • 12y ago
• Ygg2 12y ago
  I did some research on textual vs graphical representation for my master. According to that research (not on my comp so I can't reference it) - one of main advantages of text is a near universal set of symbols (like Ascii for images), more constrained relationships (images are 2D while text is essentially 1D).
  • fdb 12y ago
    Interesting. Do you have a paper you can link to?
    • Ygg2 12y ago
      Sorry, for the delay, here are some papers I read for that: * http://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/teaching/ws03-04/s-synth/papers/p33-petre.pdf * http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/publications/VL96.html The research I cited about lack of standard vocabulary of Symbols (like ASCII for text) comes from work that is not in English, and I can't find a version online. It makes intuitive and logical sense. A true visual language would parse images and have a standard sense of what symbols it may encounter.
  • Tsukiko 12y ago
    Most of text is 2D. What is usually regarded as text is just a collection of simplified and arranged 2D symbols. What is usually regarded as a picture is collection of unarranged non-simplified 2D symbols. 1D text would be more like morse code.
    • Ygg2 12y ago
      I didn't meant as a visual reprentation. Text no matter how well formatted/displayed will only flow in one direction* (be it up-down/down-up and left-to-right/right-to-left). In a picture you have no such constraints. Thus a picture is harder to scan by humans and machines alike. It takes expert knowledge to tune out some of distractions of visual representation. * Exception being texts that are deformed to instill a sense of confusion and to simply play with how text looks like. Or possibly some really obscure non-European writing system that writes non-linearly.
• Daishiman 12y ago
  Yes, and this carries over very well when talking about code and programs. Whenever I hear about the stories of the potential of graphical programming languages, "live" code environments living in their own VM, and graph-based logic stuff, the first thing that comes to mind is how come those systems have such a short shelf-life even when some of the concepts behind them are so brilliant. Between the increased storage space, the interoperability issues, and the exponential difficulty in dealing with non-text media in a variety of operations, there's so much more additional friction to these systems that in the end they're not worth it. Unless, of course, they can be trivially converted to plaintext and parsed as such, then they have a fighting chance.
• anilshanbhag 12y ago
  The arguments presented are highly biased. Text is great but images conveying the same meaning are always better. Why ? We can grasp the same information when conveyed via image. Say you are conveying an idea to someone or speaking to a conference - you always try to minimize text and use graphics to illustrate concepts as people tend to understand faster that way.
  • jks 12y ago
    Show me a video of that half-hour conference presentation, and it takes me half an hour. Give me a well-written report with the same ideas, and I'm done in ten minutes, and understand the ideas at least as well as if I had watched the video.
  • PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    > Text is great but images conveying the same meaning are always better. This is clearly false, and makes me think you didn't read the article, since the article provides a counterexample right near the beginning; try to express this in an image: "Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law." Of course nobody's proposing we abandon images; they're indispensable for many things, like the conference slides you mention. But if I had to do a presentation and was forced to choose between only text and only non-text images, I think the best choice would be clear.
    • copperx 12y ago
      > But if I had to do a presentation and was forced to choose between only text and only non-text images, I think the best choice would be clear. I had a professor that used Powerpoints with nothing but photos to accompany his lecture. His lectures are the ones I remember the most.
    • tjradcliffe 12y ago
      Slightly off topic but that's a terrible definition of human rights (and being in nice crisp text makes this immediately apparent). A far better one is, "Human rights are political conditions necessary of the life of a morally autonomous being." Tyranny and democracy are both "political conditions", as is "the rule of law" and various other things. One useful thing about this definition is that under it rights are both natural and inalienable: a right may be violated (a condition may not be met) but the necessity of certain political conditions for moral beings to be able to make their own moral choices (moral autonomy) cannot be removed. So not only does text enable us to present ideas more succinctly and precisely than images, it allows us to argue about them effectively, and to have those arguments remain somewhat accessible for thousands of years. Images can be used as components of an argument (I've never published a scientific paper without graphs) but without the accompanying text the argument is woefully incomplete, whereas text alone is capable of sustaining a vast range of arguments without any accompanying images.
• damian2000 12y ago
  I don't get the point of this to be honest ... things that can be stored as text generally are, those that aren't, e.g. videos, photos, sound files, can't be represented by text - they're media.
  • dredmorbius 12y ago
    You're new around here, aren't you? Ironically enough, I'm trying to make a webpage more readable (just for my own damned use), and was stymied on this page: http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Garrett.html http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Garrett.html By the fact that the "Education ... Positions ... Activities" elements are a fucking image. http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Garrett_files/shapeimage_2.png http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Garrett_files/shapeimage... Note that the color selection means that this is almost completely unreadable on either a dark or a light background. Actually, a deep red does fairly OK: rgb(192, 0, 0)
• GuiA 12y ago
  I agree that text is undervalued in our current media happy era; I say this as someone who uses terminal applications as much as possible (email, twitter, accounting, programming, etc. - I secretly pray for a return of the text only internet) On the other hand, there are things that pictures can convey in ways that plain text couldn't approximate. To link to a famous example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png Just looking at this, in half a minute or so, you get a pretty good idea of the quantities involved, how they evolved over time, how they are linked together, etc. Conveying the same information with pure text would be much more lengthy. I'm not going to make an entire case for this right here - just read Edward Tufte's books if you aren't too familiar with those ideas.
  • velik_m 12y ago
    I agree, the wikipedia example is especially strained, sure you can not represent that sentence clearly in picture, but can you represent Mona Lisa or Beethoven's 5th in text? Different types of representations are used for different things, sometimes they overlap and one is more efficient than the other and yes text has been pretty useful.
    • ObviousScience 12y ago
      I'd argue that the moment we're not trying to convey emotional impact, but instead, raw information, text wins even in those cases. Text is a very compact digital form, which is excellent for copying, splicing, recombining, algorithmic parsing, etc. Our computers are essentially, even in the case of MP3 or JPEG formats, storing it as a textual string and only at the very end, converting it back to images or sound. The primary uses for non-string/text based formats (and encoding schemes related to those) is when we're trying to get our (or others') brains to react in a particular emotional manner, for which it obviously makes sense to poke the right buttons.
    • ajuc 12y ago
      > can you represent Mona Lisa or Beethoven's 5th in text It was first created in text :)
• PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  I liked the article, but in retrospect I'm not clear what it's arguing against. What are the technologies that people have promoted to the author but are trumped by text? I feel like there's an interesting story there.
  • Daishiman 12y ago
    Specifically, non-textual representations of code.
• elliotec 12y ago
  This is a great argument for text over icons in design. I wonder if in 250 years people will still know what the 3 bars (hamburger?) icon did.
  • onion2k 12y ago
    Find a book written in 1764 and see how much of the technical detail (how society works, laws, money, etc) you understand. It'll be virtually zero. Technical things just don't last. The texts that stand the test of time are the stories, ideas, and human history ... Things that people will still be interested in hundreds of years later.
  • dredmorbius 12y ago
    I've got no idea what it does now. Other than that sometimes useful things are under it, sometimes not.
    • aestra 12y ago
      Me too, kinda. I mean I eventually (through trial and error) noticed it brought up a menu, but god that's not in any way obvious at first. It is funny because until I read something about it I didn't even know what it was supposed to represent. Apparently its an old icon but I never really saw it (that I can recall) until mobile got popular. I had a teacher in high school who thought the "graph" icon in Microsoft Word was "library books." She called it the "library books button." I guess 3 lines isn't enough information to convey meaning. Even though the button meant "put this information in graph form" she didn't see that the icon represented a bar graph.
• sanxiyn 12y ago
  This is why Snapchat is a chat, in addition to being a snap.
• Detrus 12y ago
  Doug Engelbart of Mother of All Demos fame talked a lot about artifacts. Books are an artifact of paper and text. WISIWYG is an artifact of print media. The technology of the medium determines the best way to convey information through it. And on top of that, whatever people are used to may influence what they do in a newer medium. For example we write to imitate speech. We use books on screens and try to recreate the world of print with WISIWYG design tools. Text may be an evolutionary winner so far, but it is by no means some ideal artifact for communicating when computers are widespread.
  • mkesper 12y ago
    Text may be an evolutionary winner so far, but it is by no means some ideal artifact for communicating when computers are widespread. Which is...right now.
    • ludamad 12y ago
      But, evolution continues
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
    • Detrus 12y ago
      Yes. There are few serious attempts to come up with better artifacts because we're so used to existing ones. And another point of Doug is we're too lazy to learn complex new artifacts. Reading and writing takes a while but it's worth it. If someone comes up with a better idea that needs time to master it will be a hard road ahead, people like short learning curves when dealing with computers.
      • Tsukiko 12y ago
        The only better solution I can think of is direct interfacing between brain and computer (network(s)).
      • 12y ago
• antonyme 12y ago
  Not only is text durable, but plain text data is universal. Take a document written in the word processor du jour 20 years ago. It is highly unlikely you could mount the physical media, let alone import the data with high fidelity. But plain text can be read by just about any tool, whereas binary/proprietary formats are limited by the longevity of the hardware/software that created them.
  • boomlinde 12y ago
    "Universal" is a strong word for data adhering to an arbitary standard that has only existed for a tiny fraction of human history. As for not being able to mount physical media, how is that problem not exactly the same regardless of the text encoding?
    • XorNot 12y ago
      Indeed - ASCII is not "universal". It's just common. Hand someone who's no knowledge of ASCII some ASCII bytes, and no compliant editors, and see how hard it is to figure out they're dealing with the English alphabet. ASCII mostly benefits from being a single-byte format - if a tool parses ASCII, then it's very easy for humans to go "right, that's English" looking at the output. But this would be just as true if we had tools which handled Unicode (and most editors do exactly that now). Or it we had some other type of common binary standard which also encoded units. It's all about the metadata - which isn't necessarily always in-band.
      • cpach 12y ago
        ”Hand someone who’s no knowledge of ASCII some ASCII bytes, and no compliant editors, and see how hard it is to figure out they're dealing with the English alphabet.” It would not be impossible for them to determine that the bit patterns 01100101 and 01110100 are a lot more common than, say, 01111010. But probably harder if they didn’t know that the bits are supposed to be divided into groups of 8.
      • marssaxman 12y ago
        It wouldn't be that hard. You can think of ASCII as a simple substitution cipher - practically a Caesar cipher, really - and simple frequency analysis makes cracking such a thing literally child's play. It might take a bit longer if the data were presented as a bitstream, and you had to work out what the char length was, but even that wouldn't be too hard as there's a lot of repetitive structure in ASCII bits.
• Derbasti 12y ago
  I am actually somewhat worried about the longevity of our current tools. When we die, what will happen to our digital photos, and writings? Will our children find our diary in our home directory like they do when it sits on the bedside table? Will they look at our wedding pictures like they do when they find old photo albums? Will they remember our PhD thesis when it was never printed, but only ever a pdf? Quite possibly, we might end up a forgotten generation, since procedures for cataloging digital memorabilia will only be invented after the lessons learned from the deaths of the first digital natives. One can only hope that archive.org will at least have an ugly copy of our blog.
  • doomlaser 12y ago
    The Library of Congress is archiving all of twitter as well, at least.
• xg15 12y ago
  Please describe an average Git commit graph as text in a way that you can actually draw some insight from it. And no, ASCII art doesn't count.
  • dtech 12y ago
    What are the interesting things about a git commit graph? Usually not the whole graph, but significant branches, commits and merges. "Tim branched v1.3 to work on feature E for a while. Important features A,B,C and fix D was commited to master in the meantime. Tim merged E shortly before the v1.4 release was made." Of course, generating such a description cannot be automated, while generating a graph can.
  • anon4 12y ago
    Text + formatting. I could just as well ask "describe a git commit hash as an image in an unambiguous way"
  • bjourne 12y ago
    Well, can you draw an average commit graph, such as that for the Linux kernel, in such a way that it is both accurate and you can draw some insight from it?
  • Tsukiko 12y ago
    IMHO tig does this pretty well. https://github.com/jonas/tig https://github.com/jonas/tig
  • pdkl95 12y ago
    Project FOO, Chapter 5, Verse 18-27 (King Linus Version) And 171b25e, after one hundred sixty and two log entries begat fe961ca. And 171b25e continued as a tagged branch after it begat fe961ca while the author made eight hundred more log entries, and begat further experimental feature branches. And when the number of log entries wase nine hundred sixty and two, 171b25e's branch was closed. After fe961ca was sixty and five years log entries, and was known as e56b8bd, who begat 882b79d. And e56b8bd was rebased to the project root after it begat 882b79d. And 882b79d preceded a hundred eighty and seven log entries and was then known as b6ff3ed, and begat 99e395a. And b6ff3ed continued after it begat 99e395a for seven hundred eighty and two log entries and begat many experimental feature branches. And the current HEAD of the house of proj/foo.git is still 99e395a. -- Joke aside, technically that problem has been solved before. For a serious answer, "git log" should be very durable, and if you want a nice graph with it, something like this has benefits of both text and graphs: git log --graph --pretty=format:'%h -%d %s (%cr) <%an>' --abbrev-commit --date=relative
• ajuc 12y ago
  People can read much faster than they can speak, and they can google a new words. You can Ctrl+F arbitraly big text files for keywords. Good luck with doing the same with 2-hours-long video file or mp3. You will need to listen to the whole thing. That's what annoys me about the new trend to do tutorials as video. You can easily diff text. Text works with version control systems. Text works with unix command line tools. You can trivialy paste relevant fragments on wiki pages, in emails or IM discussions. Google translate works with text. Screen readers work with text.
  • edmoffo 12y ago
    I read much slower than I speak :)
    • JBiserkov 12y ago
      Learn to read, I guess?
      • mguillemot 12y ago
        I think this is a common issue when reading materials not in your native language. I can read a book written in French at least twice faster than the same book written in English, even though I use English daily and consider myself fluent.
        • ajuc 12y ago
          Depends how you use foreign language. I mostly read and write English, I can read it almost as fast as Polish, on the other hand my pronounciation is still bad.
      • sp332 12y ago
        Could be dyslexia, or a physical eye problem.
    • wcoenen 12y ago
      Wouldn't that mean that you are incapable of reading text out loud at a normal pace? That seems unlikely for a hackernews visitor, unless there is something impeding you like dyslexia or poor vision.
• bluerobotcat 12y ago
  'Always bet on text' is a catchy slogan, but the author fails to define 'text'. This is confusing because the post contains a lot of pictures of things that I don't know we would all agree are text. Let's start with a radical position. Is something text iff it can be directly encoded in UTF-8? What, then, about symbols that have not yet made there way into Unicode? Like an i dotted with a heart. Does it become text when the Unicode Consortium says so? Nowadays memes tend to be distributed as (animated) bitmaps. But if we wanted to, we could encode them more efficiently. So are they text? If 'text' = Unicode then that would also mean that many mathematical expressions (matrices, fractions) are not text. Math texts before symbols were not very readable: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2014/06/before_symbols.html http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2014/06/bef... ASCII-encoded math is not without problems either. Does 'text' include semantic markup like 'emphasis', 'heading', or 'list-item'? Does it include visual markup like 'italic', 'underline', 'blue', or 'Times New Roman'? Does 'text' include newline and tab characters? Is it correct to say that newlines and tab characters exist on paper? If they don't then why do we use them to indent blocks of code? If a sheet of paper with scribblings can be text, then can a bitmap be text too? Now that I've brought up mathematics, HTML, and code, should we think of text as a linear medium or is it better to think of texts as trees? What about handritten class notes that include arrows that link together different text fragments? Are these arrows part of the text? Does that mean that texts are directed graphs? I'm even wondering if the author might actually have meant 'always bet on language', although that seems kind of obvious. Or perhaps he meant 'don't needlessly throw away information', which is what would be happening if your CMS served pages as HTML image maps. That is to say, even if we're all inclined to say that text is awesome, which we probably are, we might still be saying quite different things.
  • Tsukiko 12y ago
    Alphabets are just symbols that have some sort of meaning to you. Alphabets in a row are text. There are symbols that have no meaning to you but still are te xt such as Kanji or Korean alphabet for some people yet you consider them text. Unicode has nothing to do with what is considered text. Humans have for millenia used pictures as symbols that are used for text, in egypt for example.
• ukoms 12y ago
  Every letter, number or any sign is a "picture". In fact every written text is in fact structured array of simplified pictures, which happens to be understandable under conditions of given language rules. What should be bet is information. It doesn't really matter what communication tool will be used - information is the creme de la creme. Think about this - I can write simple text: "Mother should love their childrens". Would you still bet on text, if i wrote this in different language? "Każda matka powinna kochać swoje dzieci" or "Kila mama lazima kuwapenda watoto wao" isn't as understandable by most of people, despite the fact letter I used are almost identical. And how about other characters? "יעדער מוטער זאָל ליבע זייער קינדער" or "すべての母親が子どもを愛する必要があります" (thanks google translate ;))? In the end what matter is not text itself, but message behind it.
  • lmm 12y ago
    The difference is that text is, so to speak, digital. You can't copy a picture without information loss, but ten thousand people can copy a written sentence from each other and end up with exactly the same sentence at the end. If you're worried about "information", we can read political tracts from the second century and still understand what's meant - whereas the intended meaning of paintings or even plays from the same time period can completely pass us by.
    • Tsukiko 12y ago
      I think the person you are replying to meant symbols when he said "pictures". People aren't copying the text but the symbols. Even if the symbols were more picture-esque there wouldn't be information loss unless the symbols were too complex.
  • ajuc 12y ago
    > Would you still bet on text, if i wrote this in different language? "Każda matka powinna kochać swoje dzieci" I happen to understand that, and if I haven't I would just google translate it. Now, if you made a video saying that and I couldn't understand you - no such luck. Text is the only medium for which we have reliable operations working on semantic level.
• pdkl95 12y ago
  Early in science education is the very important lesson that you always write units for your answers, as they are more important than any numerical value you happened to get. The best teacher I ever had liked to use an example of a simple cake recipe: "2, 8, 9, 2.5" tells you nothing, while "flour, butter, eggs, sugar" is something you could experiment with to find the specific values. The text units (labels) convey far more information. I propose that this is one of the key reasons why text files are vastly superior to binary formats. While they end up very similar in normal use, the readability enables investigation and experimentation, while writing a raw struct out to a file keeps the meaning in the (possibly lost or unobtainable) original program files. // if speed is needed, you can always cache the parsed version of the text file
• huhrly 12y ago
  I'm disappointed the author has illustrated their article.
• gokhan 12y ago
  If Chinese can be read faster (I don't know), than it's the picture that matters. Here, try to represent this picture in text: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Kevin-Carter-Child-Vulture-Sudan.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Kevin-Carter-C... It's 28K, a full text definition might be smaller but will be hardly accurate. My brain can process this single picture faster than a possible text representation of it. Text is more practical 99% of the time but it's actually small pictures, known as letters, used together to symbolize concepts. I don't think my brain interprets letters individually, but my eyes mostly catch word by word, hence a picture.
  • andrey-p 12y ago
    > I don't think my brain interprets letters individually, but my eyes mostly catch word by word, hence a picture. That's a normal thing. You read words based on their outline rather than individual letters, what with the bits that stick upwards (ascenders) and downwards (descenders). Which is why ALL CAPS TEXT IS A LOT HARDER TO READ QUICKLY, and why if you jmuble some lettres in a few wrods you can still read them with relative ease. So the way humans read text is still kind of image based - you match a word based on a preexisting idea of what they should look like. It's just they're coincidentally easy to read by computers, too.
    • gamman 12y ago
      To expand on that perspective, words signify small, almost atomic, concepts which are relatively easy to learn - optimal elements with which to express less universal and more complex concepts. Each word can be viewed as a shorthand to a already previously defined expression. In that context, letters would be to words what pixels are to bitmaps. Make words more complex (also longer) and the set of those elements will be able to encompass a wider, more versatile set of "elementary" concepts (akin to a wide tree structure), but this will also be harder to learn within a reasonable amount of time. In case of pixels this is comparable to higher bit-depth. Yes, nobody knows the full vocabulary of any natural language, but we still understand each other due to knowing a common subset of words, having redundancy within and between sentences passages etc. Make words less complex and they will encompass a narrower set of concepts, but the whole set of them are easier to learn. You will usually have to use more of them to express concepts (deeper tree structure) though. Similarily, one would need to use a larger amount of pixels with low bit-depth to express intermediate colors. This is comparable to having well named functions in program code - partition the program into functions well enough and you will have created a set of relatively universal concepts, which the another person might understand without delving too much into the body of the implementing function each time. Similar relationships can be perceived on the word-sentence and sentence-paragraph level, of course. Therefore the difference between pictures and text has more to do with partitioning information between abstraction levels than with some fundamental difference. The optimal way of partitioning data varies depending on content. For example, concepts of left and right are inherently connected with our visual and spacial perception of the world and are therefore better expressed by invoking our spacial recognition (a two dimensional image). That is because definitions for these atomic concepts are practically hardwired and require no learning. Therefore, finding the best way to express information for humans and computers alike is akin to finding the optimal point between two extremes of reduced set of simple concepts and a larger set of complex concepts, that are easy enough to parse by both. In the case of humans, the physical medium will always most likely be eyes for read mode due to built-in parallel processing and high bandwidth, and a subset of our muscles (currently fingers) for write mode. I'm not sure how fast can we successfully parse audio signals, and brain-to-computer interfaces are still too slow. As for the partitioning of information - who knows? Physically we have colors, brightness, shapes, sounds, temperature, touch, and more at our disposal. But the best way depends on our brain, and what size of information units it is best equipped to process. And that is definitely not 8 bytes.
• chj 12y ago
  The vast information in DNA is also represented in "text", sort of.
• adnam 12y ago
  And then there's XML...
• Chris_Newton 12y ago
  There are plenty of advantages to text formats, to be sure. Others have mentioned many already, so I won’t repeat them. But let’s also consider both the disadvantages and how many of the advantages are “accidental” rather than inherent benefits of using a textual format. One disadvantage of text is its lack of expressive power. Try reading the equation shown in the article aloud. Now try giving a one hour lecture on advanced quantum mechanics without the aid of mathematical notation. We can often represent information far more concisely and accurately with a good notation than with text alone, particularly when there is some inherent underlying structure that goes beyond what we can conveniently represent with some linear sequence of a tiny set of symbols. Computers are good at that kind of thing, but we don’t read Shakespeare in binary, and we certainly don’t draw the Twitter icon from the article using nothing but 1s and 0s. Another disadvantage of text is how much it relies on everyone to use the same conventions, even though in the real world they don’t. Go just about anywhere in the world and you can recognise what the little pictures of a man and a women on the two doors in the restaurant mean. Replace them with ‘M’ and ‘F’ and you’ll see people who don’t speak English waiting outside to see who comes out of which door. We use different languages. We use different alphabets. In technology, we use different encodings for glyphs and invent all kinds of other concepts in an attempt to standardise how we represent written text, and we still create numerous bugs and portability issues and lost-in-translation problems. We’ve been using computers for half a century and change, and we still haven’t standardised what the end of a line looks like. Or was it the end of a paragraph? Now, certainly the simplicity of a text format has big advantages today in terms of things like searching for data and programmatic manipulation. But how much of that is just convention and historical accident? Right now, I’m typing this using an input device heavily optimised for text, because that’s what my computer comes with. If I want to input some graphical notation, say an equation, my choices are probably limited to using some awkward purely textual representation (TeX notation, etc.) or some even more awkward half-text, half-mouse graphical user interface. Neither is an appealing choice, which is why it takes those of us working in mathematical disciplines forever to type up a simple note or paper today. Technology does exist that can interpret a much wider range of symbols drawn with a stylus or other pointing device as an alternative means of input, but usually as a niche tool or a demonstration of a concept. Until we routinely build user interfaces that parse freeform input and readily turn it into whatever graphical notation was intended, a lot of us are still going to reach for a pencil and paper whenever we want to draw some quick diagram to explain an idea. But I bet a lot of us still do draw that diagram instead of speaking for another five minutes to try to explain it. Personally, I’m looking forward to the day when source control doesn’t show me a bunch of crude text-based edits to my code, but instead a concise, accurate representation of what I actually changed from a semantic point of view. But to do that sort of thing, we have to have more semantic information available in the first place, instead of relying on simplistic and sometimes error-prone textual approximations.
• ThomPete 12y ago
  Although it's certainly true text is powerful, text is also a reduction of reality. There is a whole universe of things phenomena text it's sub-optimal for. Experiences being one of them.
• RivieraKid 12y ago
  Not sure what the fuss is about. Sometimes text is optimal, other times images, video or something else is more suitable. I don't really understand the point of this article.
• jokoon 12y ago
  People can read text and understand it. Computers need parsers. Parsers are hard to write, and the time needed to parse one text will be just proportionate to the length of the text. Parsing can't be parallelized. I'm sure the browser industry could benefit from a open, compiled html format, it would be so fast. I still wonder why there is no such format. It's not about filesize though, gzip does a really great job at compressing text, but it's just about making a page load faster. It's no surprise to see web browser use so much memory: html is very flexible (there's nothing better), but it's fat. That is a problem somewhat similar to the RISC vs x86. Risc has a simpler set of instructions, is a faster processor, but executables are much much bigger, requiring more cache. x86 has a more complex set of instructions, so it's slower, but the executables are much smaller. It's a balance to find. I wonder if you could extend battery life by using compiled html. I would love to test that kind of tech on "normal" cellphones and see if how it performs.
  • jeffpetes 12y ago
    > I'm sure the browser industry could benefit from a open, compiled html format, it would be so fast. I still wonder why there is no such format. Has anybody even tried making one and it just hasn't been adopted or is this a new idea?
    • jokoon 12y ago
      Microsoft already has the .chm format, so there might be a patent, but I'm no expert. I don't really know how their format works though. It might be compiled as in "obfuscated". But I don't think there's any existing, open format like that. Plain text html has the advantage of being easily diagnosed and immediatly readable, but you could easily make a binary format decompilable. I guess most programmers prefer having plain text because it's right before their eyes, it also sort of is "open", but that's not what open source really means. It's not a new idea, but when I think about it, compiled html is a good solution to speed up web browsers. Now the .CHM format is not what you would want, as it's more targeted towards documentation, and is not extensible with CSS like html is now. It's an abandoned format I guess. Lighter than PDF I think. By the way, when I say compiled HTML, I mean a binary version of a webpage that is already parsed. Would be a tree structured file. The goal is to remove the parsing phase. But indeed, that could be a good opportunity for big tech firms to push that format. As long as it's open it might be a big success.
• Tsukiko 12y ago
  Fuck Hacker News. The comment system here sucks camel's ass. After 5 comments I couldn't post for -1.5- 3 hours. That's fucking retarded. And your fucking emotional downvote shit. Worst fucking site for discussion ever. I thought I could come back but after being involved in more free communities this site feels like a fucking prison where you get beaten and put in a quarantine cell for saying nigger or jew or fucking anything that might offend someone's fucking ass. Fuck you Fapper Jews.
  • Tsukiko 12y ago
    Can't handle the truth it seems. Thanks for the downvotes.
• ap22213 12y ago
  I was just telling my wife the other day about how much I'd hoped that text went away in favor of better communication mediums. I feel shy to admit it, especially here, but I dislike text. I dislike it because it's unnatural. I view it as a hack that was adopted to help communicate ideas through time and space. It's a cool hack, but still unnatural. It requires huge amounts of training to participate, and it has other issues. I dislike it at a more fundamental level because it tends to leave ideas 'set in stone'. Text, like architecture, seems to have an unnatural tendency to remain unmodified through time and space. It creates dogma and worship and takes up the space where new structures could have potentially formed. It creates things like the bible and the constitution - things that morph from their original intent into an unbreakable form of reverence. Since it disconnects the 'bodies' of the reader and the author, the reader has a tendency to mistake the text as something different from the author and his ideas. Text has a place - to store the facts of the world at a given time and place, certainly. To store ideas that can be accurately represented with discrete symbology. To transmit the ephemeral. But, I truly hope that we abandon text as a 'serious' medium for ideas in favor of video, audio, simulation, and virtual reality. Many of us have a bias toward text because that has been how we have lived our lives, through its symbols. Text has altered our brains. But, imagine that you could relive your life without it, with other forms of communication, would you still want it?
  • chongli 12y ago
    Text is the only good form of asynchronous communication we have in our daily lives. Without it, we'd all be recording voicemail for one another constantly. Who the hell wants to do that? Not to mention the fact that making audio recordings is much harder to do discreetly and impossible to do in many noisy or strict environs. And seriously, what is natural? How is human architecture any less natural than a beehive or a beaver dam?
    • ap22213 12y ago
      Natural is adapting to change, understanding that the environmental context is always changing. Architecture is usually built to last forever, but it always has to be torn down, at great expense. Or, the expense is too great, and it remains, an archaic eye-sore. I text message as much as anyone. But, I think we all know that text messages are ephemeral. I've edited (ironically) to make that more clear.
• tempodox 12y ago
  That's why Unix uses text, and not some binary form, for most data exchange.
• kerkeslager 12y ago
  > Text is the most efficient communication technology. By orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes: <Twitter Logo Here>. My reaction when reading this was, "Yeah, but that's because you encoded it in PNG. That's a 'good-enough' encoding, but you can definitely make it more efficient by making it an SVG, since that image is of the kind that's ideal for vector graphics." And then I remembered SVG is a text-based image format. Touché, frog hop. Touché. Adding to the point: karma system on sites such as Reddit has incentivized converting text into images, because text posts don't get karma. For example, r/quotesporn[1] (safe for work) has many more users and quotes than r/quotes[2] which allows only text. As a collector of quotes, this annoys me to no end, because I can't copy/paste the quotes into my personal quotes collection. [1] http://reddit.com/r/quotesporn http://reddit.com/r/quotesporn (safe for work) [2] http://reddit.com/r/quotes http://reddit.com/r/quotes
  • kps 12y ago
    > As a collector of quotes, this annoys me to no end, because > I can't copy/paste the quotes into my personal quotes collection. I haven't used it myself, but you might find http://projectnaptha.com/ http://projectnaptha.com/ interesting — it's in-browser OCR of text in images.
    • undergroundhero 12y ago
      I used the Chrome extension for a few months and the OCR was never very accurate. Even giant, clear block letters were often not recognized.
      • TylerJay 12y ago
        It always worked pretty well for me. It just got annoying to have on all the time.
  • gjm11 12y ago
    My reaction was: "20x20 pixels = 400 pixels so he's taking 10 bits for each pixel; no way should that be happening". So I copied the image into paint.net (I happen to be on a Windows box here) and told it to save it as a PNG. 998 bytes. (I think it takes up 4k on my HD, but that's because of filesystem inefficiency; it would take up 4k if it were a text file just saying "tweet", too.) I do agree with the general point, though: for most purposes 998 bytes of text (more if compressed) will tell you more than that little tweeting-bird image.
• VLM 12y ago
  No discussion of labor? You guys are missing a major part of the argument. Looking at OPs article, if my purpose is to explain human rights, text is staggeringly more efficient in labor of creation, not just time spent interpreting it or storing it or searching it. An artists life work might produce a painting that conveys the entire meaning of the definition from the article of human rights. Maybe. I bet that would be an amazing painting and I'd enjoy viewing it. But ... aside from high art, can we afford general commerce in an artistic style? Is it affordable for society to create an interpretive dance implementation of my mortgage statement and is that a wise use of limited artistic skill and labor? Its possible to create deeply meaningful works of art, at staggering expense of materials and labor both creation and interpretation and storage and archiving. That doesn't mean that most human creations (my water bill, the instructions for my TV, the receipt Amazon included with my $4 HDMI cable) are worthy of artistic labor. If a graphics artist or painter is any good, I don't want that artist to waste time on my electric bill, I'd much rather have the fruits of their labor hanging on a wall in a frame. If they're not any good, I don't want them screwing up my electric bill making it incomprehensible.
• netcan 12y ago
  text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology True, and very interesting to consider. OTOH, if you can simulate a person who knows how to express themselves speaking to you personally, there's and even technology you tap into. That's a technology we have actually adapted to biologically. Everything else is just hijacking faculties designed to allow your uncle to explain to you how to make rope from bark.
• Chirael 12y ago
  I know there are reasons for it, but I'm still sad to read that HTTP/2 will use a binary format instead of text :( http://http2.github.io/faq/ http://http2.github.io/faq/
  • Istof 12y ago
    maybe because binary is the lowest level format of text
• xioxox 12y ago
  Text is great, but graphs and diagrams are often better for representing certain kinds of information or relationships. When I read a scientific paper, the figures are often what I look at first after the title, sometimes even before the abstract.
• bnjs 12y ago
  Some stuff is good for stuff. Other stuff is good for other stuff. :)
• wuliwong 12y ago
  I don't understand the purpose of this post. "Text wins by a mile." Wins what? "Text is everything." I don't get his point. The opening of this post has the feel more of a fan blog about their favorite baseball team than something intellectually serious. In the second paragraph the author says "text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period." I suppose this is the purpose of this post? I guess if he is saying if he could only have one form of communication, he would choose text (removing speech from the list). I guess, but is this actually a debate? Are there really different "camps" that prefer images over text or video, etc? I could delve into the arguments presented in the article but I think first I need to understand the thesis. EDIT: To the down-voter, do you have anything to ask or say? Or are you just down-voting because you disagree? Everyone is interpreting this article to mean "there is too heavy a bias towards multimedia on the web today" but this is not the thesis of this article as I see it. The author is making arguments that text is better than multimedia in an absolute/complete sense. This is an entirely different argument.
• vph 12y ago
  If done properly, multimedia can convey information that text cannot possibly do. Text just lack the dimensions that multimedia have. An example includes the RSA Animate series, which take really good books written by really good authors and condensed that into very informative 5-minute videos.
• malandrew 12y ago
  Text also has a history and toolset that is hundreds (printing presses with moveable type) to thousands of years old (writing systems usable with some sort of scribe tool to mark clay tablets or draw on papyrus scrolls). The ability to quickly communicate in images is remarkably new relative to all that. In the renaissance you had three proper types of intaglio processes (drypoint, engraving, etching), but novel ideas required someone to create new printing blocks from scratch in a laborious process, especially relative to moveable type. Only since the advent of GUI computing systems have we had tools that make it easy to effectively communicate with images (CAD, vector and bitmap drawing apps, image manipulation apps, video editing). These tools are still very much in the realm of professionals, but tablets have done a lot to democratize the ability for laymen to use them to communicate. Furthermore, memes now form a basic form of communication, which you can see through reddit and hipchat integration. In 100 years, what the average person will be able to communicate quickly with images is likely to be unimaginable to us today. Anyways, I'm not saying text isn't superior in many ways, just that its way to early to judge images given technical limitations. I think writing systems like the Chinese writing system is instructive in this respect. It had roots from thousands of years ago, like western writing systems, and both were about as effective until the end of the 19th century with the linotype machine and the mid to late 20th century with 7, 9, 14 and 16 segment liquid crystal displays. Western writing systems enjoyed a big advantage from a technical perspective until only recently because they were simple enough in form to be conveyed by simpler technologies than the Chinese writing system. If such a gulf can exist, even if only for a few decades, between two "text" systems, then it's not a stretch to see image-based systems as comparable, but requiring better technology to become a powerful as text in the sense that Graydon is talking about here.
• brockers 12y ago
  There are 20 year old binary formats that we cannot recover because we have lost their decoders. There are 4000 year old texts we have been able to decipher because text is so many orders of magnitude easier to decode. There are anthropologists who argue that it wasn't tools or speech that led humanity out of caves, but writing (and the abstract thought that is facilitates.)
  • DennisP 12y ago
    How would I find those anthropologists' arguments? Sounds interesting. (I majored in anthropology, a long time ago.)
• joeheyming 12y ago
  This is why scripting/interpreted languages are vastly faster to produce than compiled programming languages.
• 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  Text is just small pictures, so always bet on small pictures.
• duaneb 12y ago
  I would like to point out that cave art far predates any substantial 'text' we might have. Even if just as a shape to form a glyph, images are by far the most powerful method of human communication—no language is at all necessary. Language can add power, but at such a cost (learning a language takes years).
• Istof 12y ago
  "Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology [...]" I don't really know but text is probably not the oldest...
• AnonJ 12y ago
  Text existed before the proliferation of other media probably because it was primitive and inferior. Chimpanzees lived for eternity before human beings appeared. I don't see anything great in that. We didn't use a lot of multimedia in the beginning, primarily because of tech limits. Now that the conditions are ripe, why not? If everybody is using more and more of it, it's for a reason. Apple and MS brought about a revolution, exactly because they unlocked the killer feature that was the GUI. Ask if many of us would like to go back to the 80s regarding computer UI, that would be a nightmare. I certainly feel a 2-min video overview of product features is tons better than an one-hour read. Images and in general sensory feelings are always much more natural to human beings, which in essence are still a kind of animal. Texts were invented to maintain civilizations and enforce social hierarchies, but it was never ever natural nor great in this matter. The Twitter icon takes a lot of space in a digital form, yet it only takes one minute to draw by hand, while the author probably wrote for an hour. In all it's just a pointless, childish and tunnel-sighted rant. "Bet" on text? Bet what? I'm quite amused by the number of upvotes here. Though gladly I see many sane counterarguments high up there also, which is quite reassuring :)