>> where *nix systems would use plaintext, shows just how far behind the FOSS world is. Plain text is a design decision that is still advantageous today. Plai

>> where *nix systems would use plaintext, shows just how far behind the FOSS world is. Plain text is a design decision that is still advantageous today. Plain text is universal and easy to build more complex formats on top of. It can easily be inspected, edited, compressed, encrypted, diff'ed, filtered, and processed by tools on any platform. ESR wrote: "Text streams are a valuable universal format because they're easy for human beings to read, write, and edit without specialized tools. These formats are (or can be designed to be) transparent. Also, the very limitations of text streams help enforce encapsulation. By discouraging elaborate representations with rich, densely encoded structure, text streams also discourage programs from being promiscuous with each other about their internal states and help enforce encapsulation." Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s01.html