[ciphol]

Ironically, the "pro plain text" link posted earlier used lots of formatting.

I don't see why pure plain text is better in any way than plain text with formatting, like a simplified form of HTML (<a>, <b>, <sup>, some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text.

Images have their own value, as do animations and video on occasion. Here matters become more complicated - image formats are generally non-human-readable and non-diffable (though SVG or a similar format could solve those problems for schematic-type images) and image conversions generally involve data loss. For starters, though, one should at least use a non-proprietary format for images and video.

[alanbernstein]

As the pro-plain-text post said: HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.

[ciphol]

It depends. XML is generally not human-readable, it's got way too much programming code in relation to the amount of human content. But a simple subset of HTML is definitely human-readable.

[mro_name]

No, not when it comes to what reading person they target.

Here text/plain is the only that works for e.g. my mother.

[b112]

like a simplified form of HTML (<a>, <b>, <sup>, some kind of table formatting, etc). The latter is non-proprietary, easily read and diffed, and communicates better than pure text.

Yes, but, the problem isn't typically being proprietary, when it comes to future use, but a closed, non standard, unknown format.

Yet you're creating a new standard here, with your own rules, which no one will understand, and which no automated tools can convert to another format.

(Eg some kind of table formatting)

Better to be 100% html than this.

(Maybe you meant that, but regardless, this is a good place for me to comment on standards being more important than anything else.)

[mro_name]

> no one will understand

that's a bit harsh.

And frankly, I don't understand 100% english either, but still we use it to communicate.

[b112]

The point isn't that you can learn it, but instead, having to learn it by examining it in depth, always wondering if there are things not used yet (does the doc you look at, only show part of the standard in its formatting? Imagine a doc not using a tag, but the tag is in other docs...), and then, writing code to covert it.

Standards exist for a reason.

We already have issues with people not understanding specs, and writing data out of spec, even with that spec in RFC's!

[mro_name]

my favourite is the spec that was changed after the fact:

Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339#section-5.6

But what harm does it to restrict oneself to a few html tags?