For the last few weeks a great amount of things that I have written have been written in plain text files, most of it in the release notes for each release of ExIf35. Now I find that instead of writing HTML documents for the exif35 web pages, I am writing things out in text files that are 80 characters wide. At first this made sense, for things like the list of fields that ExIf 35 uses, which is considered to be a release note itself. Additionally, I have begun recording the features list and basic instructions in text files as well. I suppose that with applications, I just don’t see the point of writing things in Word or some equally bizarre format. If I had to I could always convert the documents to PDF, but somehow I don’t imagine that being something that would be required with the general user base of my application. Now for some reason I am thinking about papers that I need to write for some of my classes, and I don’t really love the idea of having to use a Word processor, they seem so horrid and clunky. I just want to write a paper, not plan the construction of an ocean liner, why all the little buttons and shit? I guess I’m just a geek and always will be. Plain text files are really cool. XML files aren’t bad, but they do add some complication to things. I don’t know why anyone would have their application write to a binary file format, except for compression.

Anyway, I really like text files, they are so incredibly simple and so universal.