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Comment by grumpyprole | Hacker News Reader

Plain text is simple, elegant and has open-standards - it traces its origins back to telegraph codes that we have been using for hundreds of years - and still forms the basis of most of the internet now. So I am inclined to agree with the statement "text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period".

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By that same argument/logic you might as well argue cave paintings are superior over text. It traces back probably over 50000 years and is still universal today and doesn't even require understanding of a specific language - and it still forms the basis of most of society now. (art, painting, photographs, graffiti, ...)

Your reply is in text. Would you care to link a set of paintings to express your argument instead?

That's the point: take an arbitrary criterion, end up with an arbitrary answer.

It’s also in ascii, is that superior to all other character sets, or an accident of history?

> It’s also in ascii

No it isn't:

> 10:48:55.380 document.location.href

> 10:48:55.384 "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26166797"

> 10:48:57.723 document.characterSet

> 10:48:57.726 "UTF-8"

If it was really Unicode I could use an eye roll emoji to reply with a succinct image, instead of all these words to describe my reaction.

That's HN filtering your input, nothing to do with the actual encoding.

Plenty of non-ASCII symbols show up perfectly fine. For example, '£'.

Please elaborate how text is most powerful (in which aspect anyway? define powerful) and most effective (surely it isn't or text wouldn't be the prime example for stuff that's good to compress).

He would have to use words for that... Could you help him showing some image of "powerful" and "effective"?

強大的 and 有效的, respectively? (I can see some powerful person in the middle of the first image.)

Right after you provide an image that's as effective as the text of the First Amendment.

Think of all the non-text technologies involved right now for me being able to read your strawman.

Can you explain the strawman you believe the parent is presenting? What is the original argument, and what is the misrepresentation?

I am not the source of the original statement, but my own interpretation of "powerful" aligns with simplicity and flexibility. Plain text has only slightly more structure than a stream of bytes, meaning it retains a lot of simplicity and flexibility. Yes plain text can be inefficient and is overused (a proprietary unpublished wire-format does not need to use JSON). However, 50 years from now, the only data I feel comfortable knowing I'll be able to read is plain text (and possibly also JPEG and a few other well-specified and simple binary formats). Many binary formats are effectively defined by large complex and transient code bases that target particular tool chains and APIs. A new binary format needs to justify itself, less so plain text.

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