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by jibalt 1572 days ago
Older Word (doc) and Excel (xls) files aren't "zipped" and aren't plain text files.

> This definitely isn't true

Yes, actually it is.

> and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text".

Who here made such a point? Anyway, that's not true either.

> It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8

So, plain text files.

> and still potentially has problems being read on other machines.

What "other machines"? What problems? What matters is the software, not "machines".

> It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so

I was alive when EBCDIC was common, but that isn't relevant.

> and won't definitely always be.

Sure, there's the heat death of the universe eventually.