Editing 2116: .NORM Normal File Format

{{comic
| number    = 2116
| date      = February 25, 2019
| title     = .NORM Normal File Format
| image     = norm_normal_file_format.png
| 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.
}}

==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.]]

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.

The caption acknowledges that this has become a ''de facto'' standard and that we should just accept and formalize it.

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 that 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 [http://www.mspaintadventures.com/sweetbroandhellajeff/ an intentionally low-quality appearance].)

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.

But this is all undone by the request for "vector JPEG".  JPEG is a raster format, not a vector format.  Vector formats encode data about lines and shapes and so on, while raster formats encode data about each pixel or groups of pixels.  Vector formats can be translated to raster at a given resolution - line A means pixels X, Y, and Z, for example - but translating the other way is difficult - if you have pixels X, Y, and Z in a row, it is not possible to be entirely certain whether they are supposed to be a line or three small dots.  Thus, there is not (and, from some points of view, can not be) such a thing as "vector JPEG".

==Transcript==
:[Cueball is at a computer. Someone is talking to him from off-panel.]
:Voice: I sent you the data.
:Cueball: Thanks!
:Cueball: &hellip;this is a Word document containing an embedded photo you took of your screen with the spreadsheet open.
:Voice: Yeah? Does your computer not support .NORM files? Maybe you need to update.

:[Caption below the panel:]
:Since everyone sends stuff this way anyway, we should just formalize it as a standard.

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Spreadsheets]]

==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)]

{{comic discussion}}