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:
“Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
And that is why their lovers are afraid
To tell them a plain story.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)