TITLE: Your Occasional Reminder to Use Plain Text Whenever Possible
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 23, 2016  1:55 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
The authors of
<A HREF="http://brokentoilets.org/article/year-twenty-megabytes/">
   Our Lives, Encoded</A>
found that they had lost access to much of their own digital
history to the proprietary data formats of long-dead
applications:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Simple text files have proven to be the only format interoperable
 through the decades.  As a result, they are the only artifacts
 that remain from my own digital history.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I myself have lost access to many WordPerfect files from the '80s
in their original form, though I have been migrating their content
to other formats over the years.  I was fortunate, though, to do
most of my early work in VMS and Unix, so a surprising number of
my programs and papers from that era are still readable as they
were then.  (Occasionally, this requires me to dust off troff to
see what I intended for them to look like then.)

However, the world continues to conspire against us.  Even when we
are doing something that is fundamentally plain text, the creators
of networks and apps build artificial barriers between their
services.

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 One cannot simply transfer a Twitter profile over to Facebook,
 or message a Snapchat user with Apple's iMessage.  In the sense
 that they are all built to transmit text and images, these
 platforms aren't particularly novel, they're just designed to
 be incompatible.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

This is one more reason that you will continue to find me
consorting in the ancient technology of email.  Open protocol,
plain text.  Plenty of goodness there, even with the spam.
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