One of many great things about a completely plain-text blog is the security guarantees it provides
of your visitors. When all of your content is delivered with MIME type text/plain, you can be sure
there's no Javascript, no third-party cookies, no fingerprinting, etc.

You're even safe from buffer overruns in image libraries. Remember CVE-2023-4863? Last year, a bug
turned up that meant that image/webp images might be able to execute arbitrary code on your system
even if all you did was LOOK AT THE IMAGE on a web page. It's not even alone: there've been dozens
of these kinds of issues.

(Okay, I'm not naive enough to think that it's impossible that somebody might one day craft a kind
of attack, like that, that exploits text/plain content. But it demands much more of an imaginative
stretch to conceive of it, right?)

You wanna hear another great thing about a plain-text blog? Performance! Even particularly verbose
pages of plain text enjoy much smaller file sizes than the "equivalent" HTML, and compress just as
well. But with no stylesheets, javascript, images, favicon, and whatever other resources you might
find on a typical web page to worry about, it's a single round-trip for your browser. And quick to
render too.

Which also makes it perfectly usable in any browser. Visit this page in Lynx, why don't you. Hell:
visiting it using curl provides the same level of functionality as you get anywhere else! Ignoring
for a moment that I'm delivering it using modern HTTPS encryption standards, this page oughta work
on basically every Web browser that's ever existed. (And it'd be easy enough to dispense with that
HTTPS limitation and support plain old HTTP/0.9 or something if I really wanted to.)

Sure, there are downsides too. The lack of clickable hyperlinks is a bit of a big one, in my mind!
I'm not saying that everybody should be writing entirely plain text content online! But you've got
to admit, it works!

Many years ago, websites hosting hints, tips, and walkthroughs for videogames would supply most've
their content in plain text. Which made sense: the guides - each authored by an indepdendent gamer
who just happened to want to share their knowledge - were designed to work ANYWHERE. They ought to
be able to be posted to a newsgroup or a BBS just as easily as they were to a centralised website.
And these guides were - still are - often amazingly details. Great efforts were made, for example,
to draw maps of levels using little more than ASCII art, or to lay out tables of spells or weapons
and their effects. Authors even tried, usually, to achieve good justification in their line length
(which you might notice I've mirrored here!) to maximise readability. That works-anywhere approach
helped everybody. I remember once using a (cheap, simple) dot-matrix line printer (entirely unable
to render anything other than ASCII characters) to print myself out a guide to SimCity, which then
sat beside me at my desk for months or years. It Just Works [TM].

Again, I'm not saying that this is necessarily something we should idolise or seek to emulate, but
maybe there's something we can learn from all of this: that plain text - especially now, with UTF8
making it possible to support virtually any language - is a perfectly good medium that we can keep
in mind when considering the documents we make. Long after it becomes hard to find reader software
for any other format, plain text will remain readable: in the worst case, it'd be possible to read
pages like this one from the raw binary, with the help of an ASCII table. Which is pretty awesome.

(Speaking of ASCII tables, did you see my recent blog post over on my regular blog, explaining why
I think the ASCII table is beautiful and elegant? It's at https://danq.me/ascii if that's the kind
of nerdity you're into.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This post appeared on https://textplain.blog/