195K views · Aug 5, 2022 · 59:20 · 5 HN recommenders · 7 mentions · discussed 2022–2025
Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN people recommend it as an entertaining, surprisingly deep talk that comes up whenever encodings, mojibake or Unicode are discussed.
“you owe it to yourself to check out this super entertaining talk”HN comment, 2023
“you owe it to yourself to check out this super entertaining talk”
Entertaining talk that leads to more of the speaker's talks
If you found this essay interesting, you owe it to yourself to check out this super entertaining talk "Plain Text"[0] from NDC 2022 by Dylan Beattie. Rabbit hole warning: This video caused me to lose an entire Sunday watching Dylan's talks on YouTube, which are uniformly awesome. [0]: this video
“The whole talk was an interesting watch tho.”
Interesting talk on text encoding stories like mojibake
Just yesterday I watched a talk from NDC Copenhagen by Dylan Beattie about this exact topic. The story which stood out the most was this this video The whole talk was an interesting watch tho.
“one of the most interesting talks I've seen this year is one on Plain Text”
One of the most interesting talks of the year
"Best" is subjective but one of the most interesting talks I've seen this year is one on Plain Text: this video And although it's almost ten years old, Gary Bernhardt's "Birth and Death of Javascript" is one I re-watch at least twice a year and frequently recommend (and it's unreal how prescient he is in this talk -- I just hope the references to the Bay Area exclusion zone and us all running for our lives isn't as accurate as his prediction of the raise of WASM): link
“Somebody needs to watch”
Shows the messy reality of encodings behind plain text
> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. [...] But plain text? Always. Everywhere. Somebody needs to watch "Plain Text" (Dylan Beattie, NDC Copenhagen 2022) this video For example, have fun with ISO 8859-2 vs. Windows 1250. And add Windows 1252 for giggles. And for the ASCII-only persons: there still is EBCDIC.
“Dylan Beattie has done a handful of interesting talks[1]”
Talks on text pitfalls, including sort order of Danish cities
Not Tom Scott, but Dylan Beattie has done a handful of interesting talks[1] effectively on "there's no such thing as plain text" which in part covers this sort of thing. In fact, I think your Danish cities list is actually one of his examples. [1]: this video
“On plain text -- in short, it doesn't exist”
Argues plain text does not truly exist
On plain text -- in short, it doesn't exist: this video And there have definitely been UTF-8 parsing bugs before and likely will again.
“there is no such thing as plain text”
Backs the claim that there is no such thing as plain text
Yes, and .py is "plain" text too. The extension however helps with signaling the intend of the file. Also, there is something to say for the argument "there is no such thing as plain text" [0] [0]: this video
