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<title>text will stand the test of time - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<p align="center"><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
<p><b>text will stand the test of time</b></p>
<p><b>published: 12-28-2018</b></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Hundreds, if not thousands of years from now, if we somehow survive whatever catastrophe that climate change brings, archaeologists will be trying to piece together the last remnants of the civilization that you and I lived in. They will be sifting through our cultural artifacts, minds racked with headaches as they attempt to make sense of all of the chaos.</p>
<p>Long after your music files have degraded from bitrot, and the codecs that power your video files have been superseded ten times over and are no longer supported, and your heavily formatted word documents have succumbed to the inevitable corruption from being juggled among too many versions of different office suites, plain text will still shine bright and clear. Easy to backup on plain paper, readable by any text editor, barely taking up any space at all to the point of multiple backups being trivial.</p>
<p>For the deaf, videos are often transcribed to plain text for use as subtitles. For the blind, plain text can be read aloud with a screenreader. Plain text can easily be given dark or light themes to help with sensory overload, and when printed and laminated or otherwise sealed from the elements, the information it contains can be a life-saving asset when other forms of media don't have the electricity to be retrieved or otherwise fail. Plain text doesn't require an X server to display, thus making it much more accessible to users with low-end devices or headless machines forced to use the teletype only.</p>
<p>If all of the vowels disappeared from a text document, one would still be able to read most of it and reconstruct the original document. But if bytes disappear at random from a JPEG file, you're fucked. Because of the lossy compression, there is no reliable way to guess what the original bytes were.</p>
<p>Long live plain text!</p>
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