Introduction:
The first thing I would like to say, is that I am an IT novice. Until now I have used my intuition to navigate my way through the world of computers, and luckily I have been successful at this, even earning the title of g0-to IT problems girl at work.
Therefore, this first session and the things I have gleaned from my reading have fascinated me. As someone who previously had no idea about the internal workings of computers or how to count in binary numbers, or why those strange characters appear sometimes when i just want to look at my word document, this session was truly illuminating and I can't wait to learn more.
To me, the highlights from my weeks learning are the following points (put briefly):
-The relationships between bits>bytes>files>documents. Each element contains more information than the last, like a crescendo.
-Open vs. proprietary formats. I have heard people say that they hate Microsoft before, and now I understand their reasoning a little bit better. I have had some experience with OpenOffice and now I am curious about how they have managed to get around the legalities.
-Binary data can be formatted in lots of different ways, and this is signified by file extensions. I would like to explore the mechanics of this in more detail.
Overview of the exercise:
In this week’s practical session we focused on exploring formatting and accessing data in different software applications, for example Notepad and Word. It is almost like a game of pairs. The type of document you save a file as must be compatible with the application you use to open the file. If it is not, you will get a nasty surprise in the form of a language that is possibly from outer-space, very scary - see the screen grab below which shows a .docx file opened in Notepad:
So, for example, when you open a .docx file (which is compatible with word) in an application that does not display formatting – such as Notepad which is compatible with .txt files – you are presented with all the code behind the formatting instructions. I learned that Notepad acts as an x-ray machine to files stored in other formats so that when one of these files is opened in Notepad the formatting instructions – margin sizes, fonts etc – are displayed. I predict that this will be quite handy when it comes to doing some Digital Architecture.
The first thing I would like to say, is that I am an IT novice. Until now I have used my intuition to navigate my way through the world of computers, and luckily I have been successful at this, even earning the title of g0-to IT problems girl at work.
Therefore, this first session and the things I have gleaned from my reading have fascinated me. As someone who previously had no idea about the internal workings of computers or how to count in binary numbers, or why those strange characters appear sometimes when i just want to look at my word document, this session was truly illuminating and I can't wait to learn more.
To me, the highlights from my weeks learning are the following points (put briefly):
-The relationships between bits>bytes>files>documents. Each element contains more information than the last, like a crescendo.
-Open vs. proprietary formats. I have heard people say that they hate Microsoft before, and now I understand their reasoning a little bit better. I have had some experience with OpenOffice and now I am curious about how they have managed to get around the legalities.
-Binary data can be formatted in lots of different ways, and this is signified by file extensions. I would like to explore the mechanics of this in more detail.
Overview of the exercise:
In this week’s practical session we focused on exploring formatting and accessing data in different software applications, for example Notepad and Word. It is almost like a game of pairs. The type of document you save a file as must be compatible with the application you use to open the file. If it is not, you will get a nasty surprise in the form of a language that is possibly from outer-space, very scary - see the screen grab below which shows a .docx file opened in Notepad:
So, for example, when you open a .docx file (which is compatible with word) in an application that does not display formatting – such as Notepad which is compatible with .txt files – you are presented with all the code behind the formatting instructions. I learned that Notepad acts as an x-ray machine to files stored in other formats so that when one of these files is opened in Notepad the formatting instructions – margin sizes, fonts etc – are displayed. I predict that this will be quite handy when it comes to doing some Digital Architecture.
The Exercise:
The exercise involved creating a short piece of text (about the weather, very British), saving it as a particular type of file (.txt, .docx, .html), and then opening it in applications that were not compatible with that type of file.
First it was a .txt file compatible with Notepad. When opened in Word everything displayed fine. But when the text was saved in Word as a .docx file and opened in Notepad, the formatting codes appeared along with the text, and there was a lot of it!
We then created a web page (.html file) and opened that in Notepad, and it was possible to view all the markup text in detail, which i found very interesting, not even being sarcastic! This particular part of the exercise illustrated the importance of open source non-proprietary formats, as although the tags are detailed and you need training in order to understand them, the characters are still recognizable.
Lastly we linked a picture to a document instead of simply inserting it, in that instead of copying and pasting where the image is static, when you embed a file within another file the image will change as you edit it.According to my reading of the lecture notes, this now rendered my piece a 'document' instead of a 'file' as now there were several files from different addresses in my computer's memory collected within one document, and this combining of files equals a document.
My drawing of the weather:The exercise involved creating a short piece of text (about the weather, very British), saving it as a particular type of file (.txt, .docx, .html), and then opening it in applications that were not compatible with that type of file.
First it was a .txt file compatible with Notepad. When opened in Word everything displayed fine. But when the text was saved in Word as a .docx file and opened in Notepad, the formatting codes appeared along with the text, and there was a lot of it!
We then created a web page (.html file) and opened that in Notepad, and it was possible to view all the markup text in detail, which i found very interesting, not even being sarcastic! This particular part of the exercise illustrated the importance of open source non-proprietary formats, as although the tags are detailed and you need training in order to understand them, the characters are still recognizable.
Lastly we linked a picture to a document instead of simply inserting it, in that instead of copying and pasting where the image is static, when you embed a file within another file the image will change as you edit it.According to my reading of the lecture notes, this now rendered my piece a 'document' instead of a 'file' as now there were several files from different addresses in my computer's memory collected within one document, and this combining of files equals a document.
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