[Contributor training] add examples of raw text #9
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Copied from Slack:
@luisesanmartin
hey Kristoffer. It occurred to me this morning that you could also consider adding a slide to explain the difference between a binary file and a text file. It could be useful to better understand which type of files should be added to the repositories. especially for someone who doesn't have a prior programming knowledge
@kbjarkefur
thats not a bad idea. Do you have an idea for how to explain the difference between the two types as succinctly as possible to a not technical person? I tend to say all code is raw text, and leave it by that. its a bit lazy 🙂
@luisesanmartin
hahaha. I think you can give some examples. For example you can show a raw csv file opened with a text editor and a xlsx. Or maybe that can be confusing too. I just tried googling good examples for this but couldn't find any
"A text file is meant to be readable and understandable by humans. This used to mean good old ASCII, but now includes other human-language character sets as well. It even includes things like HTML or XML, which are often human-readable by a very generous definition. You can still open them in a text editor, they'll display sensibly, and you can see something reasonably meaningful" - Binary is anything else." - https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-text-files-and-binary-files
quora.comquora.com
"You can still open them in a text editor, they'll display sensibly, and you can see something reasonably meaningful." <--- I think this is a good point
@kbjarkefur
ok, maybe a list of a lot of examples, and then end with saying "You can still open them in a text editor, they'll display sensibly, and you can see something reasonably meaningful."
@luisesanmartin
yes, I think the "reasonably" is key there