There's really no such thing as "plain-text". Maybe you mean ASCII, which is indeed simple and also not useful for several billion people. (I live in one of th

There's really no such thing as "plain-text". Maybe you mean ASCII, which is indeed simple and also not useful for several billion people. (I live in one of the many countries that cannot use ASCII -- the American Standard Code for Information Interchange -- because don't speak American here.) Or maybe you mean Unicode which is an extremely long spec and absolutely cannot be handled by a first year programming student.