If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by crossroadsguy on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @11:20PM (#43180559)

RTF isn’t a better option than MD, plaintext is. We start with the premise that we are talking about plain text, as in plain text, texts. But pretty soon we are into colours, then maybe images and videos, and then what all not.

But MD still is closest to plaintext because in most cases MD (or a similar scheme), even when not rendered, can be read easily in its plaintext formatting.

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by labster on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @02:27AM (#43181519)

Honestly plaintext has a pretty bad record as a format, with all of the UTF-16, Latin-2, Shift JIS, and so on. I’d suggest paper, or for true archival storage, parchment and stone.

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by 1propionyl on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @03:12AM (#43181775)

Honestly paper, parchment and stone have a pretty bad record as a format. They either degrade or even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community. Even when the text survives and is rediscovered, translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext or connotation that would still have registered across a narrower gap.

I'd suggest an unbroken chain of oral transmission...

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by drexlspivey on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @04:04AM (#43182067)

I’d suggest stone tablets

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by labster on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @03:42AM (#43181943)

If you’re going oral tradition, you might as well use repeatedly-compressed JPEG instead. Same quality but less space used by the storage devices.

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by lou1306 on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @09:53AM (#43184139)

> They either degrade

Much more slowly and gracefully than any digital medium we have concocted so far (save for core rope memory, maybe).

> even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community [...] translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext

This pertains to the message and not the support; also, I'll take missing subtext over missing text any day of the week, thank you very much.

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by internetter on Thursday March 06, 2025 @06:28AM (#43278915)

> Much more slowly and gracefully than any digital medium we have concocted so far

https://arcticworldarchive.org/ would like a word

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by lou1306 on Friday March 07, 2025 @08:02AM (#43289824)

This is a high-tech vault located in the Arctic. Compare this with manuscripts that survived centuries by virtue of simply being on a library shelf in some random monastery.

Furthermore, the vault contents are stored on piqlFilm, which in turn uses Boxing barcodes [1]. So, they literally rely on an analog support.

I restm my case.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_barcode

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by account42 on Thursday February 27, 2025 @07:00AM (#43193548)

That's like saying paper is a bad record as a format, with all of punch cards, barcodese, and so on.

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Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown by tengwar2 on Thursday February 27, 2025 @05:07PM (#43199059)

And again, my requirement includes colours - also bold, underline, some font support, left indent etc. It's not sufficient that a file format be long-lived - it also has to encode the information that I need. MD is poor at that, plain text doesn't even attempt it.

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