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IMO the question should really be why did plain text never catch on outside the developer community. Plain text is still king for coding, and technical people a
by tconfrey 5y ago
IMO the question should really be why did plain text never catch on outside the developer community. Plain text is still king for coding, and technical people are more likely to be keeping notes etc in plain text.
I think it's related to visualization of hierarchy, emphasis, relationships, images etc. It's just harder to see the layout of a document in plain text, esp for people not used to doing so.
Of course thats not to say the visualization could not be built on an underlying plain text markup, it just wasn't in MS or Googs interest to do so. It is encouraging that a lot of the new wave of PKM tools (Dendron, Obsidian, LogSeq etc, plus my own, BrainTool) are built on a plain-text first model. Maybe its making a come back!