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.
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.