No, no, no, a thousand times, no. HTML is not easier to parse than plain text. Plain text is easily transferred, stored, parsed (with grep, or whatever you use

No, no, no, a thousand times, no. HTML is not easier to parse than plain text. Plain text is easily transferred, stored, parsed (with grep, or whatever you use for regular expressions), and, as a bonus, is easy for humans to look at. HTML helps with exactly none of those things. There's a reason that Erik S. Raymond emphasizes the power of plain text in The Art of Unix Programming. There's a reason that The Pragmatic Programmer has a chapter devoted to it. That's because plain text (more specifically plain ASCII text) is the closest thing we have to a universally understood format in computing. For something like e-mail, plain text is by far preferable to HTML, XML, JSON or some other structured format. You can't know that your target will have a parser for a structured format. The only thing you can assume is that your target is capable of reading and transferring plain text.