[thomascgalvin]

This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more pedantic than I think it needs to be.

I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand. The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible."

Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you want to view those same photos when you're fifty years old, or seventy-five, you're better off storing them as a JPEG than a PSD, and you're better off storing them on a hard drive you have access to in addition to whatever cloud they're currently occupying.

"Write plain text" is a shorthand for "use open formats." Because so much of what this audience does is test-based, plain text is the most common format we use, from source code to journaling, but that message applies to pretty much anything: if you lock yourself into a proprietary format, or a proprietary editor, you will almost certainly lose data over the long term.

[logifail]

> Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you want to view those same photos when you're fifty years old, or seventy-five, you're better off storing them as a JPEG than a PSD, and you're better off storing them on a hard drive you have access to in addition to whatever cloud they're currently occupying.

OTOH there are many photos I have, taken a decade or two ago, where I wish I'd written down my thoughts and reactions at the time, rather than just taken the picture. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but just having lots of pictures and no contemporaneous words, leaves more of a gap the longer ago it was.

[spc476]

I have a ton of family photos where I'm lucky if someone scribbled the year on the back; a bit more lucky if it's the month and year. The number of photos where names were written is way far less ("I remember Bob, but who is standing next to him?" "I don't know.").

Also, the 70s and early 80s were a bit more orange than I remember.

[mekoka]

Spot on.

A few years ago, when on a hike, if I came about some beautiful scenery, out came the camera. I'd spend most of the time capturing images with the device, rather than take in the landscape through my own senses.

Later, I'd look at those photos and noticed that they failed to convey a great deal of the emotional dimension. Now, I spend more time looking at the landscape, trying to notice all the details, and only take one or two snapshots. The idea of writing down my thoughts and reactions is worthwhile, or for practicality, maybe just audio record them and transcribe later.

[Vivtek]

This is an excellent point. I've been trying to go back and fix that, by correlating pictures with journal entries or blog posts and the like. I wish I'd taken better notes about who all these people were and what they meant to me at the time.

[lisper]

This is the reason I'm still runnins OSX Mavericks. I have a HUGE investment in iPhoto in the form of curated albums and photo captions. All attempts to migrate the iPhoto albums to Photos have failed. So I keep Mavericks machines mainly so I don't lose my iPhoto albums.

[lawkwok]

Apple Photos and I’m sure many other photo clients has a caption feature that lets you type notes for a picture. I haven’t hit into any character limits so you could presumably write a journal entry for each image.

[Zak]

It's a response to this, which does advocate the use of literal plain text files where possible: https://sive.rs/plaintext

The author mentions converting to other open, text-based formats like HTML and LaTeX for publishing and writes:

> Keep your graphics files alongside your text files. But keep your text as plain text.

[pdonis]

> It's a response to this

Seems more like a misunderstanding of it than a response. As you quote explicitly from the Sivers article, he is talking about keeping text as plain text, not about keeping images as plain text. And the Miris article is basically saying the same thing (at the end he even says plain text is still his first choice), yet appears to think he's giving some kind of opposing viewpoint.

[freddie_mercury]

I think you've over corrected too far in the other direction.

"Write plain text" is definitely not a shorthand for "use open formats".

PDF is an open format.

Approximately nobody who says "write plain text" thinks putting everything in PDF is an acceptable alternative.

They don't even want you writing in HTML, for that matter. They want Markdown.

They really do mean something fairly close to "plain text".

[thomascgalvin]

To quote myself:

> The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible."

For most collections of words, that means Markdown, not PDF. But if the words you're saving are a mortgage document or power of attorney, PDF is actually a better choice.

[selfhoster11]

I'm never going to write directly in PDF, but if I want to preserve something? 100% I will save it as a PDF if it's document-like.

[raman162]

I got the same feeling as well. Open formats and avoiding proprietary lock-in is what the spirit of "write in plain text" is about.

[mark-r]

I took a different conclusion from the plain text article. The argument isn't about open formats, it's really about plain text, simply because there's no need to have a tool to make use of it. Even open formats can get abandoned and become unusable.

[necovek]

I took the original article on plain text to mean that you should aim for plain text formats which are human-readable even without specific tools to process them.

Thus HTML, Markdown and LaTeX make sense:

  \begin{document}
  Blah
  ...

Is completely understandable to a reader even 50 years down the line, even if they don't have LaTeX on-hand.

But, it does bring an interesting counter-point: what does $$\frac{1}{n}$$ mean (to not even bring up more complex examples). It's probably no surprise that LaTeX is the lingua franca of math input because it brings in terseness, simplicity and some readability to plain text. Still, it's a programming language, so literally all bets are off in a document (you can redefine \frac to mean something else entirely).

I guess both articles, as noted elsewhere, attempt to nail down one familiar truth: use the simplest expression possible, but not simpler. One thinks that's always plain-text except for images, but there are just more contexts where this applies.

[paxys]

> I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand

Pretty sure this article is a rebuttal to the front page post on HN yesterday which said exactly that

[CRConrad]

> Pretty sure this article is a rebuttal to the front page post on HN yesterday which said exactly that

* It may be an attempt at a rebuttal, but in actuality it mostly agrees. But yeah, rather obviously in reaction to that article.

* That article didn't say quite exactly that everything should be plain text; only that most text should be plain text.

[Chris2048]

> I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text

  Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.

  -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30525605