Plain text is a mirage, in practice it is not super well defined. I find it funny that we have here lauding the simplicity of plain text while there is right before this a thread about CR/LF.
Practically you are always going to reach beyond just simple printable characters, and the moment you do so you fall into a pit of complexity one way or another.
Regarding Markdown, using * for instead of <em></em> is not significantly simpler conceptually. Indeed I'd argue parsing (or rendering) markdown is not simpler than doing so for equivalent html. That is to say that markdown does not provide any level of abstraction over html, instead it is merely a syntatic transformation.
For the purposes of this article, the author seems to treat writing Markdown and HTML files as equivalent--both are plaintext.
> And similar is the case with simple static HTML websites - a simple static page is better than all publishing platforms that can ever be created.
The content in both of those formats can be read by anything that can read text, in contrast to something like Wordpess which requires a database and large application stack to view its content.
Practically you are always going to reach beyond just simple printable characters, and the moment you do so you fall into a pit of complexity one way or another.
Regarding Markdown, using * for instead of <em></em> is not significantly simpler conceptually. Indeed I'd argue parsing (or rendering) markdown is not simpler than doing so for equivalent html. That is to say that markdown does not provide any level of abstraction over html, instead it is merely a syntatic transformation.