On 2011-11-27 09:20, Yaakov Stein wrote:
Dave
I agree that we are thinking as "content creators", and that is the problem.
The requirement is not that we will be able to write a new document in 50 years
in the same format.
The requirement is that we should be able to read the documents written 50
years before.
The problem about ASCII art is not simply the monospacing.
The main problem is the line wrapping.
I have tried many times to look at ASCII art on iPhones, iPods, and even small
pads.
Once you zoom down sufficiently to get the lines not to break,
the characters are no longer readable.
For a screen size of about 60 mm, 80 character lines means that the characters
are only 0.75mm in width.
Even assuming a "short" figure that could be viewed rotated (width 110 mm)
each character width would be only slightly more than the 1 mm needed for
viewing,
and less than the 1.5 mm needed for actual reading.
Put in another way, high-end cellphone screens presently have 640 pixel widths.
For 80 character layouts, this translates to 8 pixels per character plus
inter-character spacing,
or about 6 pixel character widths.
Even were they visible (and each pixel is less than 1/10 of a mm!)
this would mean very low quality fonts - 5*7 was the lowest quality used by old
dot-matrix printers.
And modern software is not optimized for readability at that font resolution.
So, if we expect people to be able to read our documents in 5 years, let alone
50,
we need to stop using ASCII art.
...
I don't think that the format is the problem in this case.
If we artwork is too wide for a narrow device as ASCII art, it will also
be too wide in other format, such as SVG.
What's important is that things that *should* work well on small
displays, such a reflowing prose paragraphs, and re-pagination, do so.
This is where text/plain fails big (and HTML does not).
Best regards, Julian
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