* not just Free Software, but freedom from software
@ 2016-12-27 8:28 Eric Wong
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From: Eric Wong @ 2016-12-27 8:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: misc
Whenever possible; I'd rather not rely on specialized software
or complex data formats, at all. Less code means less auditing,
less security bugs, less bandwidth, and less storage space
consumed.
In other words, I prefer to use basic/common/reusable tools
instead of specialized, less-used ones which require more
auditing, take more time to download, or won't run on old
hardware.
7-bit clean US-ASCII text is universal by now, and has been for
several decades. So I'm happy I can read my own writings from
the early 90s with just about anything. Had I chosen some
complex format, I might not be able to read those anymore, or
would have to run some unwieldy, possibly proprietary software
to decipher it. So I'm glad I made that decision to use plain
text back then, even before I'd heard of software freedom.
As an aside; I do use UTF-8 nowadays for preserving peoples'
names in attributions (and only that purpose). I often do not
have the correct fonts installed, but fortunately my editor
seems to preserve unrenderable bytes anyways.
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