Plain text is an extremely simple, open and universal format, a local optimum in the design space. It has been with us in various forms for over 100 years ever

Plain text is an extremely simple, open and universal format, a local optimum in the design space. It has been with us in various forms for over 100 years ever since the first telegram systems. Ascii has existed since the early 60's and still exists today as a subset of UTF8. It will no doubt outlive almost any other binary encoding currently in existence.