stevegattuso
This site is an always-in-progress repository for my thoughts and ideas. You'll generally find me writing about sustainability 🍃, urbanism 🏙️, programming 💾, vegan cooking 🍛, and whatever else pops into my mind.
🔗 The Future of Education is Plain Text
Published on Jun 13th, 2017.

I totally agree with this article, but I think we should expand this far past education. Anyone who doesn’t own a copy of Microsoft Word knows just how frustrating it is to receive a .docx file from someone. The file opens in some alternative office suite (for me, Pages) and you’re immediately presented with a list of incompatibilities, as your word processor doesn’t support some archaic edge-cases in the docx spec.

Plaintext/Markdown documents make life much simpler. No incompatibilities, no expensive and proprietary software getting in the way, just content in the simplest possible format. It’s future proof and easily accessible to just about any device on the planet. Hell, even .pdf files are better than sending a .docx or .ppt.