Comment by edanm
1 day ago
True, but the format is still text. In a "catastrophe", you can always just a) ignore these, or b) write custom code to process them (e.g. port the plugin to VSCode or whatever).
Still far better than a proprietary format.
1 day ago
True, but the format is still text. In a "catastrophe", you can always just a) ignore these, or b) write custom code to process them (e.g. port the plugin to VSCode or whatever).
Still far better than a proprietary format.
A proprietary format with an export function allows you the same inconvenience of having to write code for processing.
Not true for a variety of reasons:
1. You're relying on the external service to continue providing the export functionality, or else doing regular backups.
2. The format of the exports might be proprietary, so it might be orders of magnitude more difficult to parse.
3. The export might not contain all the data.
4. Even if the export isn't to a proprietary format, it might be to a format that's much harder to parse than Markdown. Markdown is not only a standard, it's fairly readable even without any parsing, as opposed to, say, exporting in HTML. Losing some functionality (often minor, depending on what you use Obsidian for) is better than losing more or all functionality.
1. No, the data is already local, the app is already local, you're not relying on anything.
2. Or it might be orders of magnitude easier to parse vs replicating all the plugins functionality. You're just arbitrarily making the alternative worse
3. That's again something you've made up that's not a generic feature of alternative proprietary format
4. It might also be export to markdown. Again, unless you make up artificial barriers
But you can also do it the other way, for example, anything non-trivial like some large table with in-cell formatting won't be readable in your primitive plain text-based proprietary format, so it will be much worse that the unreadable Excel xml or its binary alternative, but that would still be a much preferable export format since no, you're not going to develop a new spreadsheet parser that some obsidian plugin uses to make sense of it
> it's fairly readable even without any parsing, as opposed to, say, exporting in HTML.
that's true for primitive formatting needs, but in this case there are tools that can convert html to markdown that would easily do that
4 replies →
No. You might not be able to load the program to get to the export button. They might paywall it away. Etc.
No, there is no paywall or etc. This is not an imaginary anything goes area, but simple note taking where you have local client with locally synced data which can always export, so this risk doesn't exist