I find I print less these days and share electronically a lot more. For the latter, text is best. Even better, if 50 years from now I want to read these words again while riding in my hover car, I’ll be able to open the file on my iPhone 23. After all, it’s just plain text.
David Sparks, Macworld.com (via prefs)
This assumes that in 50 years we’ll still use computers based on 8-bit bytes. “Text” is universal for tech types who know about ASCII, UTF-8 and so on, but for people unaware of the technical infrastructure, Word Docs seem just as ubiquitous. Fifty years from now, “text” (as in sequences of letters) will still be around, but why should we assume the storage mechanism will be compatible with current encoding, in which, say, an A is the value 65 in an 8-bit byte and binary on/off representation?
Tone down the smug, please.
Keith Irwin
Plenty of tropes, not much Zen.
