What's Sup Forums's stance of the place in plain text files as a method of spreading information? Has HTML made it essentially pointless when combined with massive variation in screen size?
Does the humble textfile have a place in the world as anything other than being able to be turned into something else?
It's nice to get nostalgic
I use plain text files for my own personal notes, and for writing very large shitposts.
hypertext = text 2.0
This is kind of why I'm asking. I'm part of that middle point between overdesigned GeoCities "tables all the way down", and current heavy and fat JS. So I'm wondering about a discussion on whether the precursor to both has a place in the world we're in now.
99% of the useful part of the web could be handled with text files or Gopher.
Maybe in terms of it's ubiquity, but I think that it lacks the raw expression and ingenuity that I see looking at text files, at least not without a lot of markup and syntax.
But that does lead to a thing that I've noticed about old HTML files and old text files, and that's that alot of old HtML files still work, while old text files often have encoding problems in modern editors,or platform specific characters,like DOS-mode ANSI.
Would all be a lot simpler as well. You wouldn't need routing stations and data centers the size of steel foundries either.
In the olden days of the static web, the US Army ran their entire forward facing web on a single Mac SE/30.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's site was just on his NEXTbox as well. In fact I know several static sites that people run on solar-powered SoCs. Curiously the environmentalists never really bring this up.
There used to be an enterprising loon who ran a webserver on an IBM XT. I don't know if its still up though
People used to run single-user BBSs in machines at 1MHz. I suppose it really comes down to complexity and amount of use.
Though if Facebook was a BBS or a shell account deal like SDF I doubt it would be even 1/10th as large and heavy to hoste.
At my University in the 1990s a single IBM Power machine could handle 50,000 users doing shell access.
>environmentalists
They're largely a myth, the most famous one in the world uses more energy and generates more waste than a thousand normies and he owns a nickel mine, one of the most polluting types of mines.
I think I read somewhere that the current web and all associated technologies use something in he region of 20% of all the world's power.
Doesn't take that many clock cycles to run vim m8
Current web is awful too, this can't stand.
It's only going to get worse when 5G (4G uses 20x as much power as wi-fi for the same coverage) becomes widespread and everyone's on their phones watching 4K videos.
Why do phones even have such high resolution displays? Surely anything above 360p (when held at a sensible distance) gets to the point of diminishing returns?
HDTV is a meme too unless you're sitting closer than 2x the screen diagonal but normies obsessed with bullet points on a feature checklist ate it up anyway.
Hand, hip, and ear cancers will be a huge burden on Social Security in the future.
it reminds me of what memes were like in the 90s, but also a reminder that everything is shit and nothing ever changes
hogs of entropy textfiles are pretty amusing
Plaintext greatly restricts how you present and structure information. It's the ultimate style over substance.
Not only that, but on computer monitors it creates problems that we never had to deal with because people want to solve a fault we never had. Having to deal with rendering is basically working really hard to make your high-resolution screen look like a slightly better low-resolution screen.
And it is odd how we stopped hearing about all the effects of radio waves and possible links to cancer rates once phones became almost 100% adopted.
>It's the ultimate style over substance.
Don't you mean that the other way around?
The Soviets banned all microwave oven use within a 100m radius of pregnant women because of measurable, irreversible fetal changes they had started to detect.
They produced the last good publicly-available studies on the links between health issues and radio.
That's an interesting to hear.
The only place I really see text files in the wild now are on GameFAQs (but that's getting rarer) and Gopher (which can hardly count considering it has about 1000 users worldwide).
>tfw you'll never be a horny young teenager reading erotica text files again
I never read erotica, but I did have three floppy discs of Biker Mice from Mars and Beast Wars fanfiction.
Light formatting makes texts much easier to scan through.
Like using a different font for headers and using bold or italic to emphasize something.
I think restricting yourself to plain text is never a good idea unless there is some technical limitation.
You could also consider something like markdown, which unlike HTML is easy to read as plain text.
>scan through
Isn't that sort of a problem? Besides, things ALSO stand out by capitals and *asterisks* around words.
0.0.1>>BLOCK_EXAMPLE
MODEL__VERSION[0.2.3]__SOURCE[0][
ITEM__INDEX[
IDS__AON
PROPERTY[
COLORS[
'RED',
'GREEN',
'YELLOW',
_COLOUR[hex21(#EEE)]
_COLOUR[hex42(#23232323)]
],
TYPES__AON,
PRICE_BASE__INT,
IMAGES
CATEGORY__KEYS
ENUM
]
]
CATEGORY__INDEX[
[n]__ADD_INDEX[%S] => CATEGORY__KEYS
NAME
IMAGES
]
IMAGES__INDEX[ // key = IMAGES_INDEX__AON
__AON
]
ENUM__INDEX[
__AOS__KEY => ENUM
]
][$SIGNATURE]
It has special interface to recieve. HTML sux.
BLOCK[SHARED][
CATEGORY[n][
[
'SLUG1',
[0,1,2]
]
]
CATEGORY[n][
[
'SLUG2',
[3, 4 ,5]
]
]
]
BLOCK[n](
ITEM[n][
[
[0,1]
[
[1,2,3],
[0,1],
666.97531,
[
0,2
]
]
NOT_USED_WORD
]
]
CATEGORY[n][
[
'SLUG3',
[1, 3 ,5]
]
]
])
BLOCK[n](
ITEM[n][
[
[0,1]
[
[1,2,3,4,5],
[0,1],
666.97531,
[
0,1,2
]
]
]
]
])
][$SIGNATURE]
No you idiot, if I meant that I would've said substance over style.
It what way does a document that looks all-but typewritten have any "style"?
>environmentalists
they're usually scam artists trying to get government subsidies
>Surely anything above 360p (when held at a sensible distance) gets to the point of diminishing returns?
lmao what? It could be argued that phone screens above 1080p are in the area of diminishing returns, but 360p looks like absolute dogshit on a 5~ screen.
>HDTV is a meme too
No it's not, even if you base your opinion on those retarded meme graphs. And calculating optimal viewing distance based on the angular resolution of your eyes is retarded anyway, your photoreceptors aren't placed in a perfect rectangular grid that exactly lines up with the pixels on the screen.
>it is odd how we stopped hearing about all the effects of radio waves and possible links to cancer rates once phones became almost 100% adopted
It's almost like people couldn't spread their false myths any longer once phones became ubiquitous, because people were very obviously not dying from cancer caused by their phones in droves.
>The Soviets banned all microwave oven use within a 100m radius of pregnant women because of measurable, irreversible fetal changes they had started to detect.
That's a myth, do a fucking google search before posting disinfo. Don't believe me? Fucking think for a second. Enforcing such a law would be a logistical nightmare, and trying not to break it would be a nightmare too, how the fuck are you supposed to know whether there is a pregnant women in a 100m radius when you live in a commieblock building with 1000 other people? It would make a lot more sense to ban microwaves altogether, especially since microwave ovens weren't that widespread in the soviet union back then, and they weren't really affordable.
>because people were very obviously not dying from cancer caused by their phones in droves.
If smoking causes lung cancer, why don't I have cancer after smoking for one year?
>but 360p looks like absolute dogshit on a 5~ screen
Not if you hold it at a sensible distance. You're as bad as audiophiles with the "Golden Ear".
>That's a myth
No it's not.
emfanalysis.com
That's a shit analogy. An individual will most likely not get cancer from smoking for a year, but if you took a large enough number of people and had them smoke for a year, you would probably see a statistically significant difference in cancer cases between the smoking group and the non-smoking group. Also, pretty much everyone had a cellphone for the last 10 years, so it's kind of dishonest of you to choose 1 year as the time span in your example.
I looked at a 360*640 pic on my 1080p phone, and it looked pixelated, even when held at arm's length.
>links 100 page pdf
>doesn't point out what the relevant part is
>1981
>muh NASA
>being an autistic child that gets triggered by minor pixelation
>being an autistic manchild who gets triggered by lack of pixelation, and calls major pixelation minor pixelation
I write a lot of text files but for sharing information simplistic html is better because you can format it to make it comfier.
nigger, its called a README
The biggest advantage of HTML is links. That's the big thing, just that. It means that any piece of text could be linked to every other piece of text- turning it all into a single hypertext.
Plain text has place in the cultured dwellers of cyberspace. Information flows faster on strings of ASCII.
>muh too lazy to read
>muh radio waves and human physiology have changed since 1980
What is the "proper" width of HTML that's similar to the ≤ 80 characters of a text file?
You have the audacity to call people lazy for not reading tens of pages, when you yourself are too lazy to tell me a fucking page number. Btw, as far as I've looked, current microwave ovens are perfectly fine by the 1981 US standard (5 mW/cm^2 at a distance of 5 cm), and the USSR happened to have retardedly low safety limits compared to the US ones at the time, but I found nothing about laws on microwave ovens in the USSR.
>retardedly low safety limits
Actually they had reasonably low safety limits because of the actual, measurable damage a fetus undergoes if exposed to electromagnetic field deemed safe in the USA.
You're simply too lazy to read, radio waves can be harmful to people and the current habit of carrying an always-on transmitter next to your body will eventually be exposed for the creation of countless cases of cancer.
Luckily I'm not a phonecuck so I'm not worried, and I don't own a microwave either.
Peak comfy is plain HTML files read using a command line browser like Lynx.
Some of the most creative works have been achieved due to the limited abilities of medium they had available. Look at the Amiga for instance.
A higher example being rigid poetry and sonnets.
So what you're saying is that you're just shifting the goal posts here, because the document doesn't actually prove your meme law existed at all, right? Btw, even if we go by the USSR safety standards, microwave ovens should be perfectly safe at any reasonable distance, since microwaves get weaker with distance.
i keep all my (digital) notes in plaintext, nearing 2MB
youtu.be
good video on the topic.
there's no know mechanism on how cellphones could cause cancer.
Heidenwut
>hogs of entropy
christ
textfiles.com
why was this the first one i clicked?
Welcome to text files.
t. scared mobile phone cucks who don't want to believe they're giving themselves cancer by always bringing their phones with them
What are you even talking about man. Leave me alone
>Gopher
muh nigga.
And you can do that in lynx.
>Does the humble textfile have a place in the world as anything other than being able to be turned into something else?
No... but it has a place in my heart :,)
Electromagnetics engineer here.
Nope...
Yes, it gets a little weaker, but it should be safe standing close to at, looking through the window. That's not a large distance.
Although the faraday cage keeps most of the field inside.
Especially eyes are sensitive.
>Does the humble textfile have a place in the world as anything other than being able to be turned into something else?
Kind of. Plain text configuration files (.ini in the Windows world, .conf in the Unix world) certainly still have their place. For most other purposes, there's something better.
I like the groups that started off as edgy teens, then grow up and start to delve into deeper issues as they age.
HTML was a mistake.
The USA sucks, but the USSR was just as dishonest. I wouldn't trust those meme laws by any means.
It was, but that doesn't make plain text any better. BUT I will say that HTML causes something that is really starting to concern me, and that's its model ofjust linking documents that can vanish at any time, while the model of text files encouraged spreading and saving.
Odd how we stopped hearing about all the effects on the light bulb on the body when they became 100% adopted.
Never said they were better in any way. But the way the Web looks today isa perfect example of technology gone in the wrong direction.
>its model ofjust linking documents that can vanish at any time, while the model of text files encouraged spreading and saving.
Add into that that most "HTML files" aren't that at all, but are just a small part of a larger page, which makes makes saving and archiving inconvenient. If you save a blog post, for example, you'll end up saving tonnes of markup for menus that no longer work (probably because you didn't save the linked CSS and JS they require).
It's really easy to make plain text respond reactively to changes in screen size, though, by just wrapping the text.
Only an issue if you're a smartphone screenlet.
That's the theory, but in practice some viewers/editors cope very badly with that, and many text files were written with the assumption of 80 columns - no more and no less - with line breaks used to make that happen.
Can't you just automatically replace the line breaks with spaces, then wrap the text?
Theoretically yes, but that might fuck up where there are supposed to be line breaks or have other odd effects on formatting.
>no more and no less
The "no less" part isn't really true. IIRC FidoNews was 60 columns wide.
Oh, I know that many environments had widths of less than 80 columns - but people who put linebreaks in text files at 80 columns rather than relying on word wrapping either didn't know or didn't care.
Probably because everything would have had that width, that it was pointless not to break (which were there for printers as much as screens) at the paper/screen's edge. At least it was a standard everyone agreed on and had to follow even if they didn't, rather than HTML where people seem to think rules are made for breaking.
HTML was designed with some rule flexibility that treats user input generously. Unfortunately, this flexibility bloats the required parser logic.
Ideally, were the language clean, an HTML parser would take less than 100 lines of code (ignoring error handling and other tangential stuff). Instead, because of all the extra stuff they crammed into the standard, they usually span thousands of lines.
It's just bad design from the point of view of elegance and efficiency. On the other hand, HTML is one of the most successful formats of all time, and the Web's general ethos of ignoring errors as much as possible and being tolerant is part of what has given it its enormous success.
Yeah, nah. It actually wasn't any kind of strict standard; some displays would have fewer columns, some had more, and a lot of printers out there certainly had more. And that was when things were mostly actual text mode; with the advent of framebuffers and GUIs for displays and graphical printing, there was a LOT more variation. Doing line breaks assuming a specific number of columns was stupid.
>using tags to make text files that are hardwrapped but with ability to hyperlink
What's Sup Forumss stance on markdown?
I'm the only sysadmin at a small company.
If people want something done they send me a markdown file or plaintext email in Markdown, if they need information I will send them one.
I really like it that way, it's trivial for everyone (they are web devs after all) to use any kind of formatting/typesetting/markdown editor they prefer.
I do most writing in Vim (with Voom), most reading with a 2 hour hackjob of a markdown viewer in GTK
I want Jason Scott to sit on my face.
Markdown is snazzy. I wish browsers would have inbuilt support for rendering it.
This. Gopherspace is fun as shit to explore.
>go to gopher.meulie.net/1/textfiles whenever I get bored and it has information on everything you'd ever need
>can read Gopher journals from random people all day
>old code time machine
Gopher was the correct internet
I wish Gopher had a better way of pulling down entire gopherholes. Like a wget --mirror for gopher.
That's a stupid fucking analogy.
This should be trivial to write. Tools like nongnu.org
I literally use textfiles for everything at this point.
Easily made, don't require a one million procent bloated software suit to be made/viewed.
Pretty much anything you would imaging the normie opening Microsoft Word for, I'll write up in text files.
Mah nibba
Gopher sites are really the most comfortable stops I have lately.
>found out another word for text files was "g-file"
Sup Forums-file group when?
I pretty much use text files exclusively for writing down information. The only other formats I use are .c and .org but those a pretty much text files. It's just a lot easier to handle them and sync them to multiple devices since they're so small. I would like to figure out how to export/format the text files into nice looking documents. Not necessarily LaTex but within the actual file itself. Guess I'll need to look up some old GameFAQ guides.
You could always check out groff. Far smaller and simpler than LaTeX and a lot of the syntax works with plaintext files as well.
Nroff in action:
.ll 40
.nh
.ce 2
NROFF
DEMONSTRATION
The line length will
be 30 characters and
will not hyphen. This
is small, but it will
allow you to use any
text editor you like.
.ll -5
.in +5
This will make it so
the lines are indented
5 characters and the
lines are 5 characters
shorter.
.ti -5
* There are also ways
to temporarily alter the
indent of the first line
only.
NROFF
DEMONSTRATION
The line length will be 30 characters
and will not hyphen. This is small, but
it will allow you to use any text editor
you like.
This will make it so the lines
are indented 5 characters and
the lines are 5 characters
shorter.
* There are also ways to
temporarily alter the indent
of the first line only.
Whoa that's pretty cool. I need something like that in my life
Enjoy your new autistic hobby.
You can do more with groff and outputting to text rather than postscript, but you have to be careful of what options you use as it will insert line/matrix printer commands in it. Of course if you output to PDF or PS you get a nice typeset document, but not so much with nroff, which can't even handle columns. Nevertheless, it's a good starting point for using the *roff range of programs.
Idiot detected
>oreilly.com
OMG thank you so much, and thanks to O'Reilly too.