NDC Conferences
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2022–2025
59:20 · 194K views · Aug 5, 2022
Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.
HN people recommend it as an entertaining, surprisingly deep talk that comes up whenever encodings, mojibake or Unicode are discussed.
7 comments from Hacker News
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]
> 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.
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
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.