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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

The reason I use plain text is that nobody has made a similarly universal format for multimedia, and nobody has made tools for that fantasy format like Emacs and Vim. I'd love to use still and moving images at times.

The FOSS world thinks it's innovative but it's stuck in the 1980s. And because of that, ordinary people (and tech geeks) don't have a way to personally utilize and store their copious multimedia - it's all tied to some company's servers. For example, there's no good way to backup your Snapchat or Facebook page, or even better, to create an equivalent locally.

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> The reason I use plain text is that nobody has made a similarly universal format for multimedia

Care to explain what you mean with multimedia? What is missing with the existing audio/video/picture-formats?

> And because of that, ordinary people (and tech geeks) don't have a way to personally utilize and store their copious multimedia

There are dozens of tools to organize and utilize your media-content? Kodi is widely used as I know.

> For example, there's no good way to backup your Snapchat or Facebook page,

How is this the fault of the FOSS-world? They can't dicate a company what they offer and what not.

> or even better, to create an equivalent locally.

Yes, but for what? What is Facebook or Snapchat in your mind that it would be even neccessary to create it locally? But, there are tools with similar function. It's just not simple to use, because such services are not simple by they their own nature and nobody, neither FOSS nor commercial world, has made it simple enough yet to setup services for any random user.

I mean one document that contains multiple kinds of media (text, stills, moving images, etc), which you can very easily author in many server-based applications such as wikis, social media apps, etc. Word and LibreOffice struggle with it.

Take a look at obsidian, it just outputs plaintext markup. You can embed stuff in there also (I frequently paste images in, and also edit the same documents directly on gitlab or via vim etc)

Thanks, I will.

To be clear, my wishful thinking would include an editor for images and video that's like a great text editor.

That's exactly the issue. Obsidian is great but not open source. I think the closest free software equivalent is Joplin (or maybe Zettlr)

Doesn't Obsidian output open source (i.e., plain text Markdown documents)?

As far as I can see, there is no license attached to the output of Obsidian.

Open source is a license, not a standard.

Joplin is the best FOSS option I know of right now. It's a lifesaver. Sync it up to a bucket or something via webDAV and it's good to go.

Dendron is open source:

https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron

> one document that contains multiple kinds of media

Like HTML or PPTX.

Using HTML for that purpose, emedding large images and other multimedia files in it, while in theory could work, is another nightmarish stretch of the standard and depending on the size of your document could bring your system to a stall. PPTX is Microsoft open-ish format for presenting slides and I doubt using it for that purpose would be a good idea.

It's FOSS supposed lack of interest in multimedia the reason why closed gardens don't let you backup stuff?

Moreover, the FOSS world is what is pushing technology further, without FOSS you wouldn't have git, ffmpeg, 7z and other archiving tools. The reason why a lot of FOSS tools deal with plaintext is because it opens much more doors than you can even think about.

BTW, if you're an EU citizen you can get zipped html copies of your FaceBook data, and I assume of Snapchat as well.

I don't know about _moving_ images per se, but still images have been possible for a while in org mode. simply drop a link to the image file (possibly with an ORG_OPTION specifying image size) and you'll have an image displayed in the buffer of you plain text file.

(there are even packages for making a screenshot and dropping the file in the current folder and making the aforementioned link, which I use a lot during online lecture note taking)

What's a proprietary solution that makes it easy for ordinary people to utilize and store their copious multimedia?

There is a universal, open format for text mixed with images. It's HTML. Support already exists everywhere.

And, just as importantly, it’s easy to write, with lots of support in a majority of text editing programs.

That's not easy for ordinary people to write.

Most word processors will export to HTML.

hello mso-styles everywhere

not ideal but does it really matter

Quality and size of exported HTML are word processor-dependent.

Some are better than others.

You would seriously recommend people move all their photos and videos into Word and then export HTML as a solution for ordinary users?

Well I guess you could also say that formats like Markdown, Mediawiki, Asciidoc, Vimwiki and Org support images in plain text too.

All of these are easily convertible to HTML or many other formats using something like Pandoc[1].

They're also pretty easy to write and to read.

1. https://pandoc.org/

That's a start, but we still need multimedia handling: conversion, editing, etc. And we need a way to easily edit stored content: I create it, export it, now I want to edit it ...

It's not like posting something on Facebook, or using a good text editor.

It's not realistic - it's too hard to use, even for me. Do you use local HTML archives for anything? What authoring software do you use?

Yes exactly, was looking to comment this. HTML and other formats (markdown) are driven by adoption and stick around for that reason.

and what do you archive when your page source is basically a script tag to a obfuscated js pack which talks to 20 other web services to dynamically retrieve the real data?

Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Exactly. I won't use any proprietary format for stuff that should last but the free software world is very lacking.

But I also guess the likes of Facebook make it hard to access "your" data on purpose

Anytime I think about how everything is plain text, I m reminded of TempleOS (http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...), an operating system written by a schizophrenic man according to God's instruction. The fact that one guy built a system where everything is written in hypertext (yes, you can embed images in source files -- why not?), where *nix systems would use plaintext, shows just how far behind the FOSS world is.

>> where *nix systems would use plaintext, shows just how far behind the FOSS world is.

Plain text is a design decision that is still advantageous today. Plain text is universal and easy to build more complex formats on top of. It can easily be inspected, edited, compressed, encrypted, diff'ed, filtered, and processed by tools on any platform.

ESR wrote: "Text streams are a valuable universal format because they're easy for human beings to read, write, and edit without specialized tools. These formats are (or can be designed to be) transparent.

Also, the very limitations of text streams help enforce encapsulation. By discouraging elaborate representations with rich, densely encoded structure, text streams also discourage programs from being promiscuous with each other about their internal states and help enforce encapsulation."

Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html

I love plain text. I also need to use images and video.

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