I think one of the differences here is that the OP is about how it’s easier for him to analyze his own stuff with plaintext, whereas these are about why plaintext is difficult with user facing stuff.
There’s an odd tendency for things to get simple, then hard, then simple again:
Back in the Before-Before, there was no text on computers. Simple.
A bit later than that, there was text on computers, but, to a first approximation, it never traveled very far. This was the world ASCII was made for: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Other countries could (and did) make their own standards, and except for a sad few mailing tapes around, things tended to work. Everyone came around to using ASCII, except for IBM, and the world was fairly happy.
International networking made things difficult. Latin-1, from 1987, and similar eight-bit standards solved parts of the problem, but not the whole thing. For one thing, it was impossible to automatically detect which standard a document had been written in, which is why web browsers offer a little menu which lets people manually set the encoding the browser will use to display a given page. I got real familiar with that little menu in the 1990s.
Then Unicode came along and few people cared. 16 bit? Shove it in your ear! That’ll break all my software, you damn dirty hippies. Learn a normal language like the rest of us.
Then UTF-8 ate the world, except for Microsoft and Java, and things got a lot simpler very quickly.
I like this post for a lot of reasons but my absolute favorite is the way it’s phrased - not as something the author just really likes, but as a love letter. So wholesome. <3
Always nice to read more about blogs based on plain-text files.
Obligatory links ;)
https://blog.codinghorror.com/there-aint-no-such-thing-as-plain-text/
http://engineering.cerner.com/blog/the-plain-text-is-a-lie/
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/
I think one of the differences here is that the OP is about how it’s easier for him to analyze his own stuff with plaintext, whereas these are about why plaintext is difficult with user facing stuff.
There’s an odd tendency for things to get simple, then hard, then simple again:
Back in the Before-Before, there was no text on computers. Simple.
A bit later than that, there was text on computers, but, to a first approximation, it never traveled very far. This was the world ASCII was made for: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Other countries could (and did) make their own standards, and except for a sad few mailing tapes around, things tended to work. Everyone came around to using ASCII, except for IBM, and the world was fairly happy.
International networking made things difficult. Latin-1, from 1987, and similar eight-bit standards solved parts of the problem, but not the whole thing. For one thing, it was impossible to automatically detect which standard a document had been written in, which is why web browsers offer a little menu which lets people manually set the encoding the browser will use to display a given page. I got real familiar with that little menu in the 1990s.
Then Unicode came along and few people cared. 16 bit? Shove it in your ear! That’ll break all my software, you damn dirty hippies. Learn a normal language like the rest of us.
Then UTF-8 ate the world, except for Microsoft and Java, and things got a lot simpler very quickly.
if he loved plaintext so much, why are there hyperlinks on his blog?
I read this as the backend of the blog is plaintext (or rather Markdown, which made the plaintext file as blog backend possible for me).
I like this post for a lot of reasons but my absolute favorite is the way it’s phrased - not as something the author just really likes, but as a love letter. So wholesome. <3