How future proof are we talking here?

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So I am pretty new to all of this and learning a lot so far. I absolutely love everything about this program. I plan on supporting everything in the future any way I can. The flexibility, the freedom, the extensibility.

One thing I am trying to stay away from is too many plug-ins, too much GUI icing. It’s tough and I will eventually give in I am sure, but I need to make sure that I learn everything at it’s absolute core first. I am only just learning to write query’s in Dataview, which is neat because I feel like an actual computer programmer. I figured I better learn how to use it now while I only have a few dozen notes on one different subjects!

I had never really written in markdown before, but now I think it’s brilliant. I like the fact that markdown will exist well into the future and is readable even as plain text without any rendering.

Now I am wondering about going a step further…

Truly future proof…

So at this point I am trying to only use plug-ins and systems that would allow me (in-theory), if I hated myself enough, to essentially print everything out and still use it as a system, vs just single notes.

How printable and still-understandable would an entire basic vault be if you printed it in it’s native markdown?

Lets say that I had 1000 notes along with an asset folder comprised of mostly PDF’s. If I printed each note in markdown, my backlinks would still be decipherable, correct? I mean if I had my stack of notes printed and arranged in alphabetical order or similar, I should be able to sift through my stack of papers and find where my link went, even down to which header correct?

Then lets take that a step further and say that I used the feature where it tells me exactly where I highlighted and linked to in a PDF. It gives you those mapped out correspondence of exactly where it is pointing to in the PDF. However, I am not sure that this information would be decipherable in plain text and printed would it? Do those numbers correlate directly to each line or some measurement on that PDF?

I’d also have my YAML information for some? organizational purposes. Still have external URL’s I could type in. Still have highlighting and bold text able to be recreated with a highlighter and pencil.

I’ve sauced myself enough, go ahead and cook me!

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It all comes down to where all of the various information is stored for me. As long as the information is stored within the file in plain understandable(?) text, I’m thinking its kind of future proof.

Will you be able to execute a dataview query in some random text editor in the future? Probably not, but hopefully the query itself is indicative of what you wanted to look at in that particular instance. If on the other hand it just said “View connections from contacts” where the definitions were hidden in some binary form somewhere, I wouldn’t call it future proof.

Could you write plugins requiring some very specific non-understable gibberish to produce something useful? Surely, and I would consider staying away from those plugins.

Are there plugins which helps maintain/change the text/metadata of your files which helps you be more efficient, even though you can’t run that plugin in another editor? Surely, and I would still use them. Workflows can and will change, but I would like for the base data to be accessible in the future, and that I feel can be achieved also when using many of the multitude of plugins available.

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Yeah, that’s a good point that I was trying to make without even knowing how. That all available information would be stored within the file itself, in plain human-readable format.

I am really using this as a design philosophy and not as a real world use case per se.