A blog in plain text?

I live in plain text. It's easy-to-use, portable, and lightweight. So why not write a blog in plain-text too, especially a blog that will describe a minimalist, frictionless, plain-text style of computing? After all, plain-text emails work beautifully, and your writing needs work if the economical plain-text formatting conventions aren't adequate.

In the case of this blog, I'm cheating a bit. Email clients turn URLs into links, but browsers do not. It's too much to make people keep copying-and-pasting http://long.com/plicated/urls into the address bar. So for this blog I'm still writing in HTML (a bit of CSS provides a nice plain-text look). If you come back with Lynx, you won't know the difference!

Plain-text forces you to write better. Let's not make rich-text formatting a crutch.

-- Andrew Pfeiffer (2015-02-13)