We could also use a higher-bandwidth format than plain text? There is a lot of technical content which could be improved greatly by easy graphical tools for diagrams, equations, and so on, which is going a bit by the wayside because of the all-in-on-plaintext attitude. I think there is a lot of opportunity for clearer communication being totally passed over because of our collective inertia with respect to making better tools which would allow this kind of thing.
The usual difficulty with moving beyond plain text is diffing/patching. Text has battle tested and decent visualisations for viewing the delta between two versions. Other formats generally don't.
How do you visualise the diff of a diagram? How do you integrate it with git? That seems hard.
visualizing the diff of an ascii-art diagram leaves a lot to be desired as well. addding an extra box or re-routing an arrow in the diagram on the markdeep homepage would produce a very messy diff. if you want good diffs for highly visual content, converting that content to ascii art doesn't seem like the right answer to me.
the "magic" of this would also make me uncomfortable. if i draw a diagram and the rendered output doesn't look the way i want it, i wouldn't know how to fix it.
It’s a fair point, but again I think that it’s a very small price to pay for the improved communication. Things do seem hard, but we solve very hard problems in programming all the time (or so it seems), except when it comes to our tools. Plain text is still king when it comes to code because it is so easy to diff (which I think is a good choice), but how about my silly comments explaining how a system works rather than just drawing it and embedding that in a comment? I think there is a lot of potential there.
