[kijin]

Programmers' tools are great for dealing with plain text, so if you write plain text, good for you! But other people often deal with things that aren't plain text, and I don't think it's a good idea to try to squeeze them into the lowest common denominator just because it's more natural for us.

It's easy to underestimate how much meaning ordinary people bestow upon layouts, colors, and other stylistic choices that programmers often think is frivolous. I think we should focus more on how we might design tools that allow people to work together effectively on non-plain-text content (rich text, photos, videos, you name it) than how we might convince everyone to adopt our plain-text tools.