I love plain text, and generally agree with the principles here. That said, I think it's important to remember that plain text is still a binary format under t

I love plain text, and generally agree with the principles here. That said, I think it's important to remember that plain text is still a binary format under the hood. Its power comes from its simplicity and many independent implementations. There's a lesson there for designing software in general, especially APIs and protocols. I also think it's somewhat unfortunate that breaking changes were made to the plain text "API" along the way, in the form of Unicode. Unicode is great, but I wish it wasn't conflated so much with the original plain text. Plus it adds significant complexity. Sure, you can view a plain text file from 1991 in today's editors, but you can't view a Unicode file in an editor from 1991. And it's not apparent to the user why that is.