Comments on Textfiles

Over at jstg's phlog [0] he laments the lack of plain text files on
the internet. He is not alone in that sentiment, the 'modern' web is
more about looks than actual content. There are ways to cope,
however.

I love reading phlogs, browsing textfiles.com and random gopher
sites from lynx. I also find the few websites that I do read render
surprisingly well in lynx, or, failing that, elinks. When I'm forced
to use firefox (bugzilla, e.g.), the "It's all text" extension [1]
allows me to edit form textareas with emacs (or vi[m], if you
prefer).

It is sad that the all-text ezine is mostly dead, the one holdout,
the email newsletter, is increasingly sent formatted as only
HTML. The ARRL [2] is a nice exception to this, if you are a Ham and
a member of ARRL, their various email newsletters are always sent in
plain text.

[0] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jstg/phlog/6-4-2013-lack_of_text_files.txt
[1] http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text
[2] http://arrl.org