Why can a vapid blog post from a famous person make the front page, but a serious, if slightly aggressive, response to it gets downvoted? Did everyone just want to circle jerk about how they too are just like famous person?
I think "vapid" is generous. The author seems to have no grasp of concepts like encoding, representation, and medium. And the other responses to the critical comment (not troll) quite miss the point.
I have a large amount of digitized data, including programs I first hand wrote on paper and then transferred to punch cards, poems written on paper and later typed in, photographs I've scanned, photographs I've taken digital photos of, scanned books and articles that contain text in various languages along with images, digitized music and videos, etc. Some of these consist of "plain" (whatever that means) text and some don't. I've been accumulating this data since the 1960s. When I think about my collection and the ways I manage it, and my knowledge of encodings, representations, and media, and then read this article, my most polite response is ... smh.
That said, I think there is a valid point in all that confusion, and it is stated by several of the comments on the article: use Markdown or something similar (but MD is usually the best choice) when you can rather than Word or other proprietary binary formats. But MD is not "plain" text.
jibalt|4 years ago
I have a large amount of digitized data, including programs I first hand wrote on paper and then transferred to punch cards, poems written on paper and later typed in, photographs I've scanned, photographs I've taken digital photos of, scanned books and articles that contain text in various languages along with images, digitized music and videos, etc. Some of these consist of "plain" (whatever that means) text and some don't. I've been accumulating this data since the 1960s. When I think about my collection and the ways I manage it, and my knowledge of encodings, representations, and media, and then read this article, my most polite response is ... smh.
That said, I think there is a valid point in all that confusion, and it is stated by several of the comments on the article: use Markdown or something similar (but MD is usually the best choice) when you can rather than Word or other proprietary binary formats. But MD is not "plain" text.