Comment by dietr1ch
9 hours ago
> - Preserves the full 80-character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability
Readability is on the eyes of the final user, they are free to use whatever narrow column width they prefer.
> - Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned
When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font? This points at the rare occasion where there's a problem with the setup, but you could also argue that maybe there's a system with a broken image decompressor.
> Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.
Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe? Its awful[^0], but that's more of a GMail problem that could be solved if they wanted.
[^0]: Column width unbounded even on 4k monitors. Weird and inconsistent font sizes across different fonts (monospace is smaller). Reads poorly on phones too.
> Readability is on the eyes of the final user, they are free to use whatever narrow column width they prefer.
For plaintext sure. Not for code or tabular data. It destroys indentation and destroys column alignment and interleaves parts of rows. It's a horrid mess.
> When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font?
When was the last time I have to read something in a font I can't control that is forced to be proportional? Oh, constantly. Literally all the time.
> Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe?
Yes, and messaging clients, and chat clients, and everything unless it has actual dedicated code blocks that render with a horizontal scroll bar. Which are the exception as opposed to the rule.
> > Readability is on the eyes of the final user, they are free to use whatever narrow column width they prefer.
> For plaintext sure. Not for code or tabular data. It destroys indentation and destroys column alignment and interleaves parts of rows. It's a horrid mess.
I don't think I have seen unaligned html tables, nor unaligned spreadsheets made from CSV/TSV/etc. Images are worse than PDF, so I guess it's 0-stars in the 5-star data tier.
https://5stardata.info/en/
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. PDF...?
I'm talking about tables output in the terminal, in ASCII by SQL or something. By Python's tabulate. Output from a script. Or yes, even HTML tables or spreadsheet cells that get pasted into the message client as plaintext and lose their table formatting.
This isn't about a standard for publicly distributed open datasets, what are you on about? This is about quick messages in a chat or e-mail.
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