Plain Text - Dylan Beattie - NDC Copenhagen 2022

Not Tom Scott, but Dylan Beattie has done a handful of interesting talks[1] effectively on "there's no such thing as plain text" which in part covers this sort of thing. In fact, I think your Danish cities list is actually one of his examples. [1]: ▶ this video

Yes, and .py is "plain" text too. The extension however helps with signaling the intend of the file. Also, there is something to say for the argument "there is no such thing as plain text" [0] [0]: ▶ this video

> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. [...] But plain text? Always. Everywhere. Somebody needs to watch "Plain Text" (Dylan Beattie, NDC Copenhagen 2022) ▶ this video For example, have fun with ISO 8859-2 vs. Windows 1250. And add Windows 1252 for giggles. And for the ASCII-only persons: there still is EBCDIC.

On plain text -- in short, it doesn't exist: ▶ this video And there have definitely been UTF-8 parsing bugs before and likely will again.

If you found this essay interesting, you owe it to yourself to check out this super entertaining talk "Plain Text"[0] from NDC 2022 by Dylan Beattie. Rabbit hole warning: This video caused me to lose an entire Sunday watching Dylan's talks on YouTube, which are uniformly awesome. [0]: ▶ this video

"Best" is subjective but one of the most interesting talks I've seen this year is one on Plain Text: ▶ this video And although it's almost ten years old, Gary Bernhardt's "Birth and Death of Javascript" is one I re-watch at least twice a year and frequently recommend (and it's unreal how prescient he is in this talk -- I just hope the references to the Bay Area exclusion zone and us all running for our lives isn't as accurate as his prediction of the raise of WASM): link

Just yesterday I watched a talk from NDC Copenhagen by Dylan Beattie about this exact topic. The story which stood out the most was this ▶ this video The whole talk was an interesting watch tho.