Lots of folks mentioning Markdown in the comments. +1 to that. Plain text FTW. I think a lot about my own data hoarding / archiving, and plain text is such a key part of that. Very future-proof.
Ever since WordPerfect I've preferred more deterministic, lightly-formatted documents with some way to see formatting characters directly. Markdown is brilliant, basically a DSL (domain-specific language) for HTML.
The key to plain text is tooling! A couple Markdown tools I haven't seen mentioned here yet (even though they've come up on HN before) are:
This is nice. I have used https://ndossougbe.github.io/strapdown/ to quickly throw out MarkDown files for people to see as rendered HTMLs. I love the cleanliness of your script. Thanks.
I use GitHub to host my markdown files. A bit more information is in this article I wrote about it. I actually have 4 or 5 similar articles with various thoughts on this. I'm trying to find a way to make it simpler, maybe even for non-technical users, but I'm not there yet.
Google/Search tends to send quite a lot of people looking for how to take notes with Plain Text, and they seem to have benefited from my simple write-up.
Ever since WordPerfect I've preferred more deterministic, lightly-formatted documents with some way to see formatting characters directly. Markdown is brilliant, basically a DSL (domain-specific language) for HTML.
The key to plain text is tooling! A couple Markdown tools I haven't seen mentioned here yet (even though they've come up on HN before) are:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-view... - pretty-render Markdown right in the browser
https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ - standalone web-friendly Markdown formatter with many features