On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 12:21:26PM +0000, Costello, Roger L. via Unicode wrote: > [Definition] Property: an attribute, quality, or characteristic of something. > > JPEG is a binary data format. > CSV is a text data format. > > Question #1: Is the binaryness/textness of a data format a property? > > Question #2: If the answer to Question #1 is yes, then what is the name of > this binaryness/textness property?
I'm afraid this question is too fuzzy to have a proper answer. For example, most Unix-heads will tell you that UTF16LE is a binary rather than text format. Microsoft employees and some members of this list will disagree. Then you have Postscript -- nothing but basic ASCII, yet utterly unreadable for a (sane) human. If you want _my_ definition of a file being _technically_ text, it's: * no bytes 0..31 other than newlines and tabs (even form feeds are out nowadays) * correctly encoded for the expected charset (and nowadays, if that's not UTF-8 Unicode, you're doing it wrong) * no invalid characters But besides this narrow technical meaning -- is a Word document "text"? And if it is, why not Powerpoint? This all falls apart. Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ in the beginning was the boot and root floppies and they were good. ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ -- <willmore> on #linux-sunxi ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
