Older Word (doc) and Excel (xls) files aren't "zipped" and aren't plain text files. > This definitely isn't true Yes, actually it is. > and it kind of misses

Older Word (doc) and Excel (xls) files aren't "zipped" and aren't plain text files. > This definitely isn't true Yes, actually it is. > and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text". Who here made such a point? Anyway, that's not true either. > It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8 So, plain text files. > and still potentially has problems being read on other machines. What "other machines"? What problems? What matters is the software, not "machines". > It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so I was alive when EBCDIC was common, but that isn't relevant. > and won't definitely always be. Sure, there's the heat death of the universe eventually.