[sssilver]

I will never understand why all these minimalist content publishing systems pretend that visual imagery is unnecessary.

Humans have expressed themselves in images long before they have expressed themselves in text.

Any system that forces humans to express themselves purely in ASCII, monospace, and monochrome is crude and borderline disrespectful towards human expression.

It made sense in 1983, when the technology to power these expressions was not prevalent. But why do this today? I know they exist, but who are the people who confine themselves this way? Is it acknowledged as an act of self-discipline or self-restraint? Some sort of an artistic statement? What is the process through which one arrives at "I will commit to this system, and always only communicate in written speech, laid out in uniform monochromatic typographic format. I will walk into these constraints voluntarily."

Any medieval monk writing manuscripts, any ancient Greek or Roman or Egyptian or Chinese capturing history and literature on parchments would have gasped at such a thought.

[openrisk]

Writing evolved after visual imagery to solve the poor ability of visuals to express abstractions. It too is based on imagery, thats what script is after all, but leverages the emergent social pattern of literacy to convey highly encoded information.

This invention (that we now take for granted) has been so exalted in the minds of earlier generations that they would go to extremes to banish imagery (iconoclasts etc.)

It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script: concise expression of the most abstract ideas.

Commingling imagery and text has its many uses of course: try describing a graph or diagram or a real scene using text only. But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the experience.

[Sharlin]

> It takes its most extreme form in mathematical script: concise expression of the most abstract ideas.

Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based interfaces are terrible for is rendering mathematical notation.

> But for other purposes (literature) its a distraction that forces the brain to switch mode and diminishes the experience.

Yet we do not (typically) consume literature in a monospace, typographically impoverished form.

[jampekka]

> Yet one thing that these minimalistic text-based interfaces are terrible for is rendering mathematical notation.

You can notate mathematics using text. In fact the mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps is typically rendered from such text-based notation.

Mathematics is increasingly done using text-based notation (e.g. Lean, Mathematica, SymPy), which I actually prefer because it's typically unambiguous unlike the traditional notation with wildly varying conventions and a lot left implicit or even ill-defined.

[GoblinSlayer]

Oh, SymPy looks great!

[jampekka]

It is, at least for basic stuff. The biggest problem is that one forgets to solve stuff by hand after getting used to SymPy doing it automatically.

Sometimes SymPy fails at problems that Mathematica can solve though. And Mathematica is expensive pain.

[GoblinSlayer]

I mean as a mathematical notation, not as a solver.

[liotier]

> mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps are typically rendered from such text-based notation

What everyone was impatiently waiting for: LaTeX microblogging !

But seriously, a specialized Bluesky client could easily do that for scientific communities - no need to reinvent the whole stack.

[GoblinSlayer]

One complaint is LaTeX isn't semantic, but visual markup.

[Sharlin]

Of course. But good luck trying to render LaTeX in a text terminal.

[openrisk]

They must live and die by their choices but I am defending the category as a whole. Both limitations can be lifted without altering the essence of a distraction free reading flow.

[ipaddr]

The ironic part is you post this on a throwback site where content is more important than presentation.

[sssilver]

I gather from your text that you perceive images to be presentation and monochrome monospace text to be content.

Isn't all expression in a nutshell an act of presenting content?

Is emphasis content, or is it presentation? What about lowercase and uppercase? IS THAT CONTENT? Or "simply" presentation?

All expression is an attempt for our content to be perceived as we intend. All expression is a presentation of our content, including the very text of it. The text itself is simply one of the dimensions of our content's presentation.

[troupo]

HN is not a blogging site, and its content is ephemeral comments.

It's main value is threaded discussions which excuses the archaic and limited tools.

[maximinus_thrax]

And medieval monks in heaven are all gasping in unison

[richardw]

Let everyone make the things they want to make. Make something else? These people do you no harm, why pull their efforts down?

“When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create”

- Why the Lucky Stiff

[sssilver]

I figure there's value in sharing why one would not want to use something that's being shared/offered here.

Hacker News is a discussion platform. People submit ideas with the expectation that the community would find them interesting enough to discuss them.

When someone submits an idea of text-only content publishing, is it not perfectly reasonable to discuss one's thoughts on that idea, whatever they happen to be? And if those thoughts didn't resonate or apply, would lack of upvotes not conveniently push these thoughts to the bottom of the page where most never reach?

If I was an author of such a platform/idea/product, these are exactly the kind of responses I'd be most interested in reading. Not the feel-good high-fives, but the "what did I miss that others find important"s.

[richardw]

I think it’s turned into the place to submit work when you want as much harsh feedback as possible. You can get upvotes but need to run the gauntlet of “why isn’t it open source/here’s a better app/this is dumb” etc. Top comments are often pretty caustic, so that’s the culture we’ve built. I guess if you want to sharpen your offering really fast, this is optimal.

“Any system that forces humans to express themselves purely in ASCII, monospace, and monochrome is crude and borderline disrespectful towards human expression.”

What is the outcome you’re hoping for, by giving that feedback? Should we kill the authors now or just shun them until they give us pictures?

Edit: every single system makes choices. You either try please everyone or you choose a set of people to focus on. This one isn’t for you, and that’s ok. It may fail and that’s ok too. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to human expression, if anything it’s a form of human expression.

[abudimir]

First time I heard of _why - interesting dev story. Thanks!

[LudwigNagasena]

There is a cargo cult of absence of features because old cool developers are used to email, IRC, EMACS, etc (stuff they got acquainted with in their college days 30 years ago).

[anthk]

Emacs allows inlince images since the first X-based release, even more with Emacs. Inline images on Email and everything.

Also, Email itself supports MIME too.

But no image will be concise enough against a good wall of text explaining it.

30 years ago was 1994. People used to post images under Usenet too. But a lot of these images without some annotation they are useless.

[JdeBP]

It's clear from the demonstration video alone that this is not an ASCII system, and indeed reading the doco confirms that the text files are considered to be UTF-8.

This gives some irony to your analysis. Because this system thus permits one of the the very same ancient expression-in-images systems that you are alluding to: hieroglyphs are in Unicode.

I expect that in the 9 years of its existence, almost no-one has ever used them in this system.

[sssilver]

The word "ASCII" was a grotesque, artistic verbal presentation choice for the substance of content I intended to convey :)

I figured it supports UTF-8. I believe the gist of my point is still valid.

Images are content. Layout is content. Typesetting is content. All are components of expression.

[JdeBP]

Alas, it isn't valid if one goes beyond even reading the doco.

The underlying library that the tool uses, click (https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/), turns out to include the idea that the "tweet" strings can contain ECMA-48 control sequences.

This permits not only boldface and italics, but also (on very old terminals and very modern terminal emulators) underline, strikethrough, faint, reverse video, invisible, and even 8 whole colours. (-:

Again, though, I expect that in the 9 years of the system's existence, no-one has actually used this in earnest.

In part, this is because the default mode seems to be to apply a regular expression substitution to attempt to strip out control sequences, because of course ECMA-48 and ECMA-35 are over-expressive permitting things like OSC, NEL, PM, APC, cursor motions ("layout is content"), insert/delete/erase, and code page changes.

Amusingly, the regular expression substitution is not based upon an understanding of ECMA-35 and is faulty.

[maximinus_thrax]

> The word "ASCII" was a grotesque, artistic verbal presentation choice for the substance of content I intended to convey :)

Is this GPT generated? I find it hard to believe someone actually talks/writes like this.

[sssilver]

I promise it isn’t. English however isn’t my native language — I grew up in Armenia, with Armenian as my native tongue and Russian as my first “foreign” language.

[maximinus_thrax]

Interesting. I'm in a similar situation, but my first foreign language was French. I believe the source of English education makes a difference. In my case, it was Rambo movies :))

[benjifri]

In this case, because it's a text file based system that works through the CLI. It is kind of ironic though that the "Demonstration" in the introduction is a video

[chickenfeed]

I used to enjoy using browsers like W3M, if you can just throw assets at your favourite tool of choice, like an image viewer, a video player, it just feels better for me as I don't have to learn a different interface for every site I visit.

[prmoustache]

> I will never understand why all these minimalist content publishing systems pretend that visual imagery is unnecessary.

I don't think anybody is prevented from putting a link to an image, nor to build a client that autoload linked images (the same way that say, some gemini browsers like lagrange can be configured to show you images by default).

[cess11]

It's built with Python, where strings default to UTF-8. Did they invent their own strings and constrained them to ASCII?

Do you have the same view of books? You're condescending and refuse to spend time with books that don't have pictures?

[juliangmp]

Books and social media platforms are actually two different things

[cess11]

You forgot to mention the differences you find important and why they ought to be important to the authors of the project in TFA.

[ulbu]

some people like different things. imagine that.