I like it, it was fun to see the plain version at the end too. Outliving formats is an interesting angle. I'm sure some of us know people who still use proprie

I like it, it was fun to see the plain version at the end too. Outliving formats is an interesting angle. I'm sure some of us know people who still use proprietary formats and software from the 1990s or earlier. They keep backups, but they keep using what worked for them. Some years back I wrote a modernizing-controller for a Dreamweaver site behind a traditional craftsman's business that is doing pretty well, especially with the help of the web. The modernizations I needed to plan for were so many that they had to think long and hard about years remaining until retirement. The scope changes I received were super awkward because I could feel their frustration with new ways of doing things. It was strange to see things like the .dwt Dreamweaver formats still in use. They also used other proprietary software & formats. But I do find it hard to imagine that text files (in the sense of the article) would have run the site at any point. Text files do take a bit of a stoic philosophy to really grok at some level IMO, and this has been true since maybe the '70s? The thing about text is, first of all the information is the expression framework. This is backwards for a lot of psychologies out there. The emotional components show up as decoration. Font color schemes, etc. The article also mentions mind mapping and other tools. Those can be really important as a way to express what is inside the mind as a completely different type of process. Mind maps in particular address a problem of categorical expression, in a breadth-first context. This makes the visual itself a very useful format-as-framework. I find that I use them just enough (I have my own variant) that I keep a semi-yearly Freeplane file at hand even though I mostly use text. Anyhoo. :-) Lots of good points in there. Thanks for sharing the article.