Brent Gueth wrote:
This is not a good thing. Picking plaintext is genious in the sense, that unless basic ASCII changes (not likely compared to XML losing favor) plaintext will always be able to be read.
Are we confusing ASCII with plain text? Because the former is an encoding and the latter is a format. You are comparing apples with rocks and telling us we should eat rocks because they last longer. Plaintext will stay forever because it defines nothing, and so will never have to be changed. TANSTAAPF: there ain't no such thing as a plaintext format. There are roughly 16,000 plaintext formats around, because every etext defines its own format. You cannot talk of a plaintext "format" at all.
Maybe some of you don't care that the guy with commodore 64 can read plaintext but can't read XML because he is only one person on the planet.
That's easy to fix: he should get a girlfriend. (But he should let the C64 at home on the first few dates.) Basically you say that millions of people with modern PCs should be forced to use stone-age technology because one person somewhere cannot afford to get an old PC from ebay? Even the PCs we are sending to African Schools are Pentium class machines!
plaintext was supposed to be replaced by Postscript plaintext was supposed to be replaced by word perfect plaintext was supposed ot be replaced by word plaintext was supposed to be replaced by PDF plantext was supposed to be replaced by HTML plaintext is supposed ot be replaced by XML? Not bloody likely
Horses were supposed to be replaced by cars. Are we confusing existence with fitness for purpose? Or are we confusing existence with demand? Because nobody wants plaintext. Plaintext is ugly on a screen, is ugly on a PDA, is ugly on paper. Plaintext cannot be converted automatically into anything else. But, yes, it exists, like the treponema pallidum. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org