The Plain Text Project (plaintextproject.online)

Article summary

The Plain Text Project is a website that aims to promote the use of plain text to make work and life easier and more efficient. The project believes that plain text is not just for geeks or techies, but for anyone. The website provides articles, resources, and tools to help people use plain text effectively. The goal is to show that plain text can be a simple and powerful tool for productivity and organization.

Main themes

• plain text productivity
• data storage formats
• markup and formatting
• versioning and diffing
• human readability vs machine parsing
• Unicode and character encodings

What commenters say

• Serving markdown as text/plain should be acceptable if the client is a web browser.
• Plain text files without a parser or schema can lead to breakage when modifying the data.
• Using plain text for structured data can be more efficient and easier to read than using formats like JSON or YAML.
• Custom plain text formats can be difficult for machines to parse and may require custom parsers.
• Plain text does not have to mean ASCII, and can include Unicode characters and other encodings.
• Some argue that plain text should not include markup or formatting, while others see it as a spectrum from free-form text to more structured formats.
• The use of plain text can be beneficial for versioning and diffing, especially when combined with tools like Git.
• There is a trade-off between the ease of human readability and the ease of machine parsing when using plain text for data storage.