Do these tools facilitate composition in multimedia?
I love using my text tools, including Vim and efficient markup; I would hate to give them up. However I feel that I'm holding onto to something obsolete. The multimedia communication future is here, and only our tools and habits are holding us back. (My dream is that someone, even Bram Moolenaar, will write something as efficient as Vim that incorporates multimedia as a first class, supported format.)
People use multimedia instinctively where the tools are available, such as SMS/MMS, social media, etc. Why do so many of our composition tools and communication mediums still treat multimedia as a second class citizen? Why do Word, our editors, or HN's comment system not fully incorporate multimedia?
End users and even many HN readers are accustomed to this state of affairs, but one day text-only (or text-primary) composition will look archaic. (Yes, I know text is more appropriate in many cases, but images/movies are more appropriate in others and our tools stop us from using them.)
In medicine, we use simple but formal notes for our thinking. In the military, we use radio messages. In law: plain text you could generate with a type writer. I submit, code is the same for computing.
Excepting architecture and engineering, you could argue that most professions don't need markup.
> Why do Word, our editors, or HN's comment system not fully incorporate multimedia
Because you can usually do more with less. And ascii is about as less as you can get.
Why would you think that "text-primary composition will look archaic"? What exactly is this "social media"-form of communication are you talking about? Because much of the social media that I see is text-based.
Just curious, but were you around during the time of MySpace's peak? That was a site that fully integrated multimedia into profile creation and wall posting, much more so than Facebook.
If you're primarily a communicator and not a coder making code for other coders, text-primary composition already looks archaic.
Let's not forget that the main aim of PDFs and even TeX is to replace ink on paper.
As a goal for 2014, I'd suggest that perhaps this is lacking ambition - as is the idea that the best of all possible systems is one where you crank a handle on some input data to run a batch process which generates various output formats.
>much of the social media that I see is text-based.
In my very average Facebook feed most messages include at least one image, and as a wild hand-wavy estimate maybe 10% include a video clip.
Entire sites are devoted to slides, video tutorials, and photo sharing.
I guess if 'We only do text' works for you, that's fine. It doesn't work for a lot of users.
As a footnote, consider that it might be possible to write software using images, sounds, and video clips as semantic tokens instead of text strings.
There's no real reason, beyond fear of the unknown, to constrain programming to text shuffling.
My guess is that over the next century or so, associative intelligent systems that can parse (e.g.) visual, verbal and other sensory metaphors will provide better tools for solving certain kinds of problems than strict Turing logic.
I love using my text tools, including Vim and efficient markup; I would hate to give them up. However I feel that I'm holding onto to something obsolete. The multimedia communication future is here, and only our tools and habits are holding us back. (My dream is that someone, even Bram Moolenaar, will write something as efficient as Vim that incorporates multimedia as a first class, supported format.)
People use multimedia instinctively where the tools are available, such as SMS/MMS, social media, etc. Why do so many of our composition tools and communication mediums still treat multimedia as a second class citizen? Why do Word, our editors, or HN's comment system not fully incorporate multimedia?
End users and even many HN readers are accustomed to this state of affairs, but one day text-only (or text-primary) composition will look archaic. (Yes, I know text is more appropriate in many cases, but images/movies are more appropriate in others and our tools stop us from using them.)