Julian Reschke wrote:
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.
ASCII arts is just fine.
Just that there there is an awful number of "modern" software
that is too stupid to display ASCII text with fixed pitch fonts.
(i.e. it applies an information-destroying compression algorithm
on the information content).
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.
Not always, but often.
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).
The real problem is buggy software for displaying on small displays.
Reflowing ASCII is *no* problem whenever ASCII text is reflowable
at all. It can be done in 1-2 KByte of code. Displaying HTML or XML
usally requires more than a megabyte of code.
And btw. most of the Web pages that I try print out on paper
have truncated borders, waste lots of paper because only a small
portion of the surface is used for information and sometime only
the first page gets printed (the rest only accessible inside
the browser with a scroll bar).
How to print ASCII text is the type of problems for which easy solutions
existed already 20 years ago. That some modern devices fail to
display ascii text in a reasonable fashion is a demonstration that
the software in these devices is defective, not that it is not
possible to sensibly display ascii on such devices.
-Martin
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