Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have

There are not many computer file formats I would trust to still be readable fifty years from now, but plain text is one of them. That may sound like faint praise. A text file cannot embed a spreadsheet, preserve elaborate page layouts, run a presentation, or provide many of the conveniences we expect from modern applications. What it does instead is store text in one of the simplest and most widely understood forms in computing, and that simplicity is a large part of why it has lasted. Almost Nothing to Go Wrong The Unicode Standard defines plain text essentially as a sequence of character codes, without the additional formatting information associated with rich text. Fonts, colors, layout, and similar presentation details belong somewhere else. From a user’s point of view, the important part is simpler: the file contains the text itself without requiring a particular application to make sense of it. I can create a text file on Linux, copy it to a Windows machine, put it on a web…