2116: .NORM Normal File Format - Revision history

SomebodyElse: /* Explanation */ just linking characters' names

2026-05-13T12:31:02Z

‎Explanation: just linking characters' names

FaviFake at 18:28, 4 March 2025

2025-03-04T18:28:25Z

172.68.22.176: /* Explanation */ dead link

2024-12-11T19:07:27Z

‎Explanation: dead link

SteveTheNoob: minor edit about double space in title text

2024-05-20T12:34:43Z

minor edit about double space in title text

Natg19: Undo revision 277068 by Donald Trump (talk)

2022-05-26T17:43:13Z

Undo revision 277068 by Donald Trump (talk)

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Donald Trump: Crapped page

2022-05-26T16:45:12Z

Crapped page

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Jacky720: Reverted edits by Xray Kilo Charlie Delta (talk) to last revision by Vandalbane

2022-05-23T18:39:32Z

Reverted edits by Xray Kilo Charlie Delta (talk) to last revision by Vandalbane

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Xray Kilo Charlie Delta: Reverted vandalism with User:CRLF/OneClickUndo.js

2022-05-23T18:26:50Z

Reverted vandalism with User:CRLF/OneClickUndo.js

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Vandalbane: Reverted vandalism with User:CRLF/OneClickUndo.js

2022-05-23T18:13:13Z

Reverted vandalism with User:CRLF/OneClickUndo.js

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Xray Kilo Charlie Delta at 18:05, 23 May 2022

2022-05-23T18:05:47Z

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@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 The comic image links to a [https://twitter.com/openelex/status/853977391747801088 tweet by OpenElections] that displays an Excel file produced by the City of Detroit.
 ==Explanation==
-[[File:XKCD2116.norm.jpg|thumb|200px|An example of what Cueball might have received.]]Cueball's friend seems to have sent him a rather unusual datafile passed off as a new "normal" standard. People who work with data, and need data sent to them electronically, typically need it sent in a way that they can easily use it &ndash; either in a text format that can be copy-pasted, or as a spreadsheet or CSV file that can be imported into a spreadsheet program, or such.
+[[File:XKCD2116.norm.jpg|thumb|200px|An example of what Cueball might have received.]][[Cueball]]'s friend seems to have sent him a rather unusual datafile passed off as a new "normal" standard. People who work with data, and need data sent to them electronically, typically need it sent in a way that they can easily use it &ndash; either in a text format that can be copy-pasted, or as a spreadsheet or CSV file that can be imported into a spreadsheet program, or such.
 Information sent by Cueball's friend in this fashion &ndash; a photograph of a spreadsheet embedded into a word processing file &ndash; is not only aesthetically unpleasing, but essentially useless for any purpose beyond being looked at.  The recipient has no choice but to retype the entire data set, or attempt to use optical character recognition (OCR) and hope that no mistakes are made in the process.

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 | titletext = At some point, compression becomes an  aesthetic design choice. Luckily, SVG is a really flexible format, so there's no reason it can't support vector JPEG artifacts.
 }}
+The comic image links to a [https://twitter.com/openelex/status/853977391747801088 tweet by OpenElections] that displays an Excel file produced by the City of Detroit.
 ==Explanation==
-[[File:XKCD2116.norm.jpg|thumb|150px|An example of what Cueball might have seen, but presumably with numbers or other data rather than words.]]
+[[File:XKCD2116.norm.jpg|thumb|200px|An example of what Cueball might have received.]]Cueball's friend seems to have sent him a rather unusual datafile passed off as a new "normal" standard. People who work with data, and need data sent to them electronically, typically need it sent in a way that they can easily use it &ndash; either in a text format that can be copy-pasted, or as a spreadsheet or CSV file that can be imported into a spreadsheet program, or such.
 Information sent by Cueball's friend in this fashion &ndash; a photograph of a spreadsheet embedded into a word processing file &ndash; is not only aesthetically unpleasing, but essentially useless for any purpose beyond being looked at.  The recipient has no choice but to retype the entire data set, or attempt to use optical character recognition (OCR) and hope that no mistakes are made in the process.
 Any functional relationships between data (such as formulas used to compute data values) have been lost.  Further, the size of the data is bloated by being converted first from numbers and formulas into text, then from text into graphics, and then from graphics to embedded graphics in a word processing document.  This adds nothing to the content, and only adds steps to the process of retrieving the data.
-However useless this kind of data manipulation might be, it is becoming more and more common, especially as more computer-illiterate people find "creative" ways to exchange information. Usually, their job is getting the data together in a Word file, and the only file they have is a screenshot of the spreadsheet, not the original file, so they just put the screenshot in the Word file. Cueball's friend suggests that this is now a normal way to send files, and that Cueball should update his system to support this new type of file, represented by a ".norm" suffix. In [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2341 2341: Scientist Tech Help] a .norm like file is referenced.
+However useless this kind of data manipulation might be, it is becoming more and more common, especially as more computer-illiterate people find "creative" ways to exchange information. Usually, their job is getting the data together in a Word file, and the only file they have is a screenshot of the spreadsheet, not the original file, so they just put the screenshot in the Word file. Cueball's friend suggests that this is now a normal way to send files, and that Cueball should update his system to support this new type of file, represented by a ".norm" suffix. In [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2341 2341: Scientist Tech Help] a .norm like file is referenced. The caption acknowledges that this has become a ''de facto'' standard and that we should just accept and formalize it.
-This comic is reminiscent of the comic [[763: Workaround]], which also describes convoluted formats.
+The comic image links to a [https://twitter.com/openelex/status/853977391747801088 tweet by OpenElections] that displays an Excel file produced by the City of Detroit. It contains a lookup table for the city's absentee precincts in 2016. The data had been input as clip art (images) of the values, instead of being entered in the spreadsheet cells. This comic is reminiscent of the comic [[763: Workaround]], which also describes convoluted formats.
-The title text suggests that eventually compression (or at least compression with data/quality loss) will be unnecessary as technology improves in the future. SVG ({{w|Scalable Vector Graphics}}) is a vector graphic format that is fundamentally a lossless format, representing images using geometric figures. {{w|JPEG}} is a lossy format, representing images as an array of rectangles approximating the original image.  Randall suggests that some people in the future may choose to include JPEG artifacts to SVG vector graphics for its "aesthetics", perhaps as a throwback to when lower quality JPEG images were commonplace, or as a form of {{w|glitch art}}. It is possible that some in the future will view JPEG artifacts as giving their images a quaint/retro feel, much the way that some people today use sepia-tone filters on their images. (And much like some people today use JPEG artifacts to give their images an intentionally low-quality appearance.) The double space before aesthetic, although likely accidental, is possibly a reference to a bug that could arise when using lossy compression.
+The title text suggests that eventually compression (or at least compression with data/quality loss) will be unnecessary as technology improves in the future. SVG ({{w|Scalable Vector Graphics}}) is a vector graphic format that is fundamentally a lossless format, representing images using geometric figures. {{w|JPEG}} is a lossy format, representing images as an array of rectangles approximating the original image. Randall suggests that some people in the future may choose to include JPEG artifacts to SVG vector graphics for its "aesthetics", perhaps as a throwback to when lower quality JPEG images were commonplace, or as a form of {{w|glitch art}}. It is possible that some in the future will view JPEG artifacts as giving their images a quaint/retro feel, much the way that some people today use sepia-tone filters on their images. (And much like some people today use JPEG artifacts to give their images an intentionally low-quality appearance.) The double space before aesthetic, although likely accidental, is possibly a reference to a bug that could arise when using lossy compression.
 This is made even more reasonable by the fact that the SVG specification employs a lot of filters and already can embed regular pixel-based JPEG files. Furthermore, it allows JavaScript to be used to manipulate objects, meaning such an effect may be implementable in the current SVG 2.0 specification.
@@ Line 44: / Line 36: @@
 ==Trivia==
-Several days after this comic release Microsoft announced support for loading pictures into Excel. A photo of a printed data table shall be converted it into a fully editable table. See: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/1/18246429/microsoft-excel-covert-photos-data-tables-editable-table-ai-feature Microsoft Excel will now let you snap a picture of a spreadsheet and import it (theverge.com)]
+Several days after this comic was released, Microsoft announced support for loading pictures into Excel. A photo of a printed data table shall be converted it into a fully editable table. See: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/1/18246429/microsoft-excel-covert-photos-data-tables-editable-table-ai-feature Microsoft Excel will now let you snap a picture of a spreadsheet and import it].
 {{comic discussion}}

@@ Line 25: / Line 25: @@
 This comic is reminiscent of the comic [[763: Workaround]], which also describes convoluted formats.
-The title text suggests that eventually compression (or at least compression with data/quality loss) will be unnecessary as technology improves in the future. SVG ({{w|Scalable Vector Graphics}}) is a vector graphic format that is fundamentally a lossless format, representing images using geometric figures. {{w|JPEG}} is a lossy format, representing images as an array of rectangles approximating the original image.  Randall suggests that some people in the future may choose to include JPEG artifacts to SVG vector graphics for its "aesthetics", perhaps as a throwback to when lower quality JPEG images were commonplace, or as a form of {{w|glitch art}}. It is possible that some in the future will view JPEG artifacts as giving their images a quaint/retro feel, much the way that some people today use sepia-tone filters on their images. (And much like some people today use JPEG artifacts to give their images [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/sweetbroandhellajeff/ an intentionally low-quality appearance].) The double space before aesthetic, although likely accidental, is possibly a reference to a bug that could arise when using lossy compression.
+The title text suggests that eventually compression (or at least compression with data/quality loss) will be unnecessary as technology improves in the future. SVG ({{w|Scalable Vector Graphics}}) is a vector graphic format that is fundamentally a lossless format, representing images using geometric figures. {{w|JPEG}} is a lossy format, representing images as an array of rectangles approximating the original image.  Randall suggests that some people in the future may choose to include JPEG artifacts to SVG vector graphics for its "aesthetics", perhaps as a throwback to when lower quality JPEG images were commonplace, or as a form of {{w|glitch art}}. It is possible that some in the future will view JPEG artifacts as giving their images a quaint/retro feel, much the way that some people today use sepia-tone filters on their images. (And much like some people today use JPEG artifacts to give their images an intentionally low-quality appearance.) The double space before aesthetic, although likely accidental, is possibly a reference to a bug that could arise when using lossy compression.
 This is made even more reasonable by the fact that the SVG specification employs a lot of filters and already can embed regular pixel-based JPEG files. Furthermore, it allows JavaScript to be used to manipulate objects, meaning such an effect may be implementable in the current SVG 2.0 specification.

@@ Line 25: / Line 25: @@
 This comic is reminiscent of the comic [[763: Workaround]], which also describes convoluted formats.
-The title text suggests that eventually compression (or at least compression with data/quality loss) will be unnecessary as technology improves in the future. SVG ({{w|Scalable Vector Graphics}}) is a vector graphic format that is fundamentally a lossless format, representing images using geometric figures. {{w|JPEG}} is a lossy format, representing images as an array of rectangles approximating the original image.  Randall suggests that some people in the future may choose to include JPEG artifacts to SVG vector graphics for its "aesthetics", perhaps as a throwback to when lower quality JPEG images were commonplace, or as a form of {{w|glitch art}}. It is possible that some in the future will view JPEG artifacts as giving their images a quaint/retro feel, much the way that some people today use sepia-tone filters on their images. (And much like some people today use JPEG artifacts to give their images [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/sweetbroandhellajeff/ an intentionally low-quality appearance].)
+The title text suggests that eventually compression (or at least compression with data/quality loss) will be unnecessary as technology improves in the future. SVG ({{w|Scalable Vector Graphics}}) is a vector graphic format that is fundamentally a lossless format, representing images using geometric figures. {{w|JPEG}} is a lossy format, representing images as an array of rectangles approximating the original image.  Randall suggests that some people in the future may choose to include JPEG artifacts to SVG vector graphics for its "aesthetics", perhaps as a throwback to when lower quality JPEG images were commonplace, or as a form of {{w|glitch art}}. It is possible that some in the future will view JPEG artifacts as giving their images a quaint/retro feel, much the way that some people today use sepia-tone filters on their images. (And much like some people today use JPEG artifacts to give their images [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/sweetbroandhellajeff/ an intentionally low-quality appearance].) The double space before aesthetic, although likely accidental, is possibly a reference to a bug that could arise when using lossy compression.
 This is made even more reasonable by the fact that the SVG specification employs a lot of filters and already can embed regular pixel-based JPEG files. Furthermore, it allows JavaScript to be used to manipulate objects, meaning such an effect may be implementable in the current SVG 2.0 specification.