What are the advantages of expressing information in the simplest possible format?

Question

I want to apologize in advance if my headline is not specific enough, but I think this is a general question, although I have a very concrete example:

In my team we maintain a test specification which we use every time we release software. The specification is written in Word and, as a consequence, we occasionally have compatibility problems, wrong formatting in some parts of the document and sometimes people use the heading levels incorrectly. Nothing major, but annoyances none the less. But essentially our specification consists of test cases which can be described simply as a headline with some numbered instructions.

I think we would be a lot happier with using a lightweight markup language (e.g. AsciiDoc or Markdown) since it would be sufficient to describe the content. We would have other concrete benefits (add it to git, use diff tools, easily convert to other formats, not needing Word).

This made me think - are there any advantages, in general terms, to expressing information in the simplest possible format?

Answer 1

In a sense you answered your own question. There are a few main advantages of conveying the information in the simplest format possible:

• Ease of transport (or portability)
• Clarity
• Searchable

What I mean by ease of transport is the ability to use that information in as many places as possible. Using plain text for instance gives you incredible portability from one system to another. However, without formatting it might not be as clear.

Clarity is where the information conveyed is easy to understand and get across. While using something like Word can make the information very clear through advanced formatting as soon as you need that information somewhere else, the formatting can get mangled or lost. Thus clarity is lost and a simple information format with transportable formatting helps.

Simple information formats tend to be more information dense. That is what information is recorded in the format is actually appropriate information rather than lots of meta information used to handle things such as formatting. This tends to make the information more searchable with better hits. Most systems can search Word text with no problem and this is rarely an issue these days, you will still get more bang for your buck searching through simpler formatted documents.

I prefer to use Markdown myself where possible. Most of our information is kept in a wiki for this reason where it is mostly just plain text and simple formatting markers. This makes the information searchable, clear, and portable.

Answer 2

To separate data from implementation.

The more simple the data format, the more flexible its use becomes. The more complex the data format, the less flexible and more susceptible it's contained data will be to bit rot.

Take database data. While it's possible to transfer the data in it's native format, that data will not be understood by any other system and, in some cases, different versions of the same system.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is CSV. It's practically ubiquitous for storing and transferring data in plaintext but the disadvantage of using it for database backups is you lose the structural rules.

Structure is useful too and, in some cases could be represented as it's own data format. For example, SQL stores database structure, CSS stores layout and design structure, config files store implementation structure, XML schemas store XML format structure, all of which use plaintext as the universal medium.

While not new, it's becoming more common to see data formats and even platforms (ex MVC) fundamentally designed to separate data and implementation. The reason being, data in it's true form is timeless whereas implementations are in constant flux. It just makes sense to store data in a format that presents the lowest barrier of entry to use in current and future implementations.

Even formats like Markdown present implementation specific issues but their simplicity makes them much easier to adapt than a more complex format (ex Word). Especially considering that the Markdown format itself is designed with conversion (ie to HTML) in mind.