What was the point of publishing this information in such a non-functional format? Is this an example of minimalism taken too far (not even an anchor tag for the twitter link) or is this some publishing standard I'm not aware of?
I feel like the document could have benefited a great deal from some simple font color styling. I guess in its current format it can easily be copy-pasted somewhere else and still look exactly as it does?
Apart from the links not working, that's as functional as it gets for conveying text-based information. All the rest is fluff and the bytes to information ratio gets very bad, very fast (e.g. several MB to read a 1000 word CNN.com article).
Although the question make me fell a little old. How young are you buddy, for this is a plain old textfile -- used to be a very very common way to convey information. Last generation's GitHub readme.md files so to speak.
In fact, if one wants to know more about the phenomenon of textfiles, and read some classic stuff along the way: http://www.textfiles.com/directory.html
25, so I grew up reading most of my content on wikipedia or forum posts, which is about the level of markup I mean (minus the ridiculously huge banner signatures that people were so fond of on invision forums ;) )
You make it sound like this is a big publication I worked weeks on. :) It's not. It's a toy project I wrote Saturday.
As far as "publishing" goes: I sent a tweet about it in the hopes someone might find it interesting. And now it's trending on Hacker News! Woohoo! ^_^
The link is just a deep link into my SVN repo, directly to the README file.
For the record, my weekend project this Easter was to watch the first season of The Expanse...
/That's/ a non-functional format. Given the choice of everyone being time.com or everyone being like this website, I'd happily return to the days of amazing ascii art.
It's a shame mobile browsers are so dysfunctional that they struggle to cope with plain text or minimally marked up HTML, but the blame lies with the browsers, not the content.
With no zoom the linebeaks are uncomfortable (which is ok, because EOL is difficult) http://imgur.com/9QulRkn
Zoom shows combination of uncomfortable linebreaks and horizontal scrolling: https://imgur.com/ti7gGMV
Reader mode does reflow the lines, but prevents zoom. (Also destroys ASCII diagrams).
None of these combinations are good.
To adjust this settings users need to go to settings and adjust text size and then to accessibility and adjust text size.
I'm not making a judgement call, I'm trying to learn.
Articles or links can be submitted by anyone not necessarily content authors.
Further I think a lot of people here (myself) included are quite happy with plain-text (it loads fast, it works well with various font/screen sizes) - note also that the README is in fact markdown formatted, so feel free to open it in your reader of choice.
Is it? How do you see that? Or is that a different link?
Why doesn't my browser render markdown?
https://markdownshare.com/view/bc431de6-16e7-44db-ad52-705a2...
A stronger example of the problem is, I think, some of the text from 4AM documenting their ongoing reverse-engineering efforts, for example: https://ia600509.us.archive.org/6/items/Muppetville4amCrack/...
The 40col text might be "retro", but it also makes lines wrap so soon that my eyes get tired reading it. (And yet—unlike e.g. an RFC file—I can't just plop it into a Markdown parser or what-have-you to get reflowable lines of HTML out, because 1. it's not really in any particular format, and 2. the alternating "prose text", "formatted console interaction", and "formatted ASM listing with long prose comments beside them" sections aren't demarcated or delimited in any particular way.)
When your text becomes sufficiently "simple", it can actually become an accessibility problem.
Actual point: Dear gods that 4am crack is awful to read, and I'd actually prefer github angry fruit salad in spite of mostly hating the latter.
So, yeah, there are virtues to simplification, but it can still be overdone - and while the article we're commenting on was great to me, it probably overdid it slightly - and the link you provide is an unintentional reductio ad absurdum of the approach.
(long comment written because I expected to disagree with you until I clicked and went aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa)
Here's a blog post I've always found interesting about Markdown, from Joe Armstrong: http://joearms.github.io/2016/03/21/Why-Markdown-Sucks.html
Plain text documents don't solve the problem he's talking about, but they at least mitigate it somewhat -- WYSIWYG is preferable to a changing pseudo-standard mangling an author's intent, in my opinion.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It could have been worse, they could have published it some binary format!
Maybe some CSS to font-color the code to make it more readable? I like that in my IDE and I doubt it would cost much.
Maybe in-document anchor tags to allow linking to certain sections?
Vehemently opposed to your other suggestions. But I'm weird and cranky, and very much miss the days of most of computing being done in plain text. It's really the first and only universal data format/API.
The place to make plaintext pretty (if you care) is in the user's editor of choice where they can customize to their hearts content.
I do know I'm in the very tiny minority with this opinion though.
Remember when the internet was just plain text and ASCII art? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Or are you talking about the way way back? I wasn't around for that.
Why is that up to the document and not the user agent? The user agent can be configured so that all documents like nice and uniform.