[Singletoned]

I hate to be pedantic[1], but:

> HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.

On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files.

> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.

This definitely isn't true, and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text". It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8, and still potentially has problems being read on other machines.

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

[1] Okay, I love to be pedantic

[senko]

You can't be pedantic and then say Word and Excel are files. They're applications.

On a more serious note, ascii and nowadays utf8 are customarily considered plain text, the fact that a specific charset is used doesn't mean it's not text.

[usrbinbash]

> that there's no such thing as "plain text"

Please show me a computing device that cannot deal with ASCII.

And UTF-8 has, by now, reached a level of ubiquity that encompasses almost everything in IT as well.

[mro_name]

indeed, why not use real plain text – not markdown.

Homer was able to write the fall of troy and Shakespeare Hamlet without bold text.

So what can't one express without?

[pubby]

There's still EBCDIC systems being used.

[cpressland]

The Commodore 64 I’m building could probably be taught how to read ASCII with enough effort, but out of the box it can’t.

I appreciate modern computers conform to standards, but that doesn’t mean that these standards have always existed, or will always exist.

[jibalt]

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.

[zelphirkalt]

When plain text is zipped, it is no longer plain text and as such it does not take advantage of all the things that can be done with simple text files, unless there is additional tooling, which again unzips the zipped files. This creates some friction of course. General tools do not bother with implementing a knowledge about every format on the planet, so those zips stay zips and are treated as bninary data by version control, which makes them not too useful.

[severak_cz]

> On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files.

but this is true only for newer versions. In older versions it was binary salad derived from C's data model.

And even in new versions these are far from files you can safely edit by hand.

[jibalt]

doc and xls files have nothing to do with "C's data model".