Plain Text and Rich Text
Files that contain markup or other meta-data are generally considered plain-text, as long as the entirety remains in directly human-readable form (as in HTML, XML, and so on (as Coombs, Renear, and DeRose argue, punctuation is itself markup)). The use of plain text rather than bit-streams to express markup, enables files to survive much better "in the wild", in part by making them largely immune to computer architecture incompatibilities.
According to The Unicode Standard,
- «Plain text is a pure sequence of character codes; plain Unicode-encoded text is therefore a sequence of Unicode character codes.»
- styled text, also known as rich text, is any text representation containing plain text completed by information such as a language identifier, font size, color, hypertext links.
For instance, Rich text such as SGML, RTF, HTML, XML, and TEX relies on plain text. Wiki technology is another such example.
According to The Unicode Standard, plain text has two main properties in regard to rich text:
- «plain text is the underlying content stream to which formatting can be applied.»
- «Plain text is public, standardized, and universally readable.».
Read more about this topic: Plain Text
Famous quotes containing the words plain, text and/or rich:
“To revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment.... All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“Can you remember? when we thought
the poets taught how to live?”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)