If you've got a script to generate well formed RSS from plain text it's almost zero extra effort to generate HTML from that same source text. Then you get all s

If you've got a script to generate well formed RSS from plain text it's almost zero extra effort to generate HTML from that same source text. Then you get all sorts of hypermedia features like hyperlinks. This plain text page has a bunch of links and footnotes that are not being well served by the medium. RSS is fine and dandy but a majority of your audience may not even have a feed reader. Most readers will detect a site's feeds from metadata pointing to feeds. They won't be able to do that with plain text. Even if you just stick with default user agent styling, a viewport meta tag can make content far more readable. There's no need to do anything more complicated than unstyled HTML with a few meta tags to get a much richer experience than plain text. Literal plain text is an aesthetic but a readability problem on modern devices. No one is primarily reading on 80 character terminals. Unless your plain text has hard line breaks to enforce a column size it's going to break at a browser's viewport boundaries. On wide screen displays you end up with uncomfortably wide column width and on mobiles you'll get odd text sizes because the browser's viewport is virtual pixels that map is varying ways to screen pixels.