Long live plain text.
A couple of days ago I saw an interesting article on Slashdot (which was actually from the New York Times, oddly enough) noting that news headlines and other electronic media are getting written in a more boring and straightforward style so that people can find them easier on Google. The commenters were making jokes like “Hire me as a writer, I’m boring” but I say this is a wonderful thing.
Why? I’m all about plain text. If you can break it down into plain text you know you can slice-and-dice it a million different ways using tools that go back 30+ years. I’m thinking specifically about UNIX command line processing tools, and I’m a big fan of having them available on my Mac just a Terminal session away.
I’m glad we escaped from the CD-ROM era mostly unscathed and the only Flash-heavy web sites that anyone cares about are using Flash to play video. Plain text portability and processing is central to the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, in my opinion. Let’s look at a few different examples, shall we?
RSS
This is the big one. The web is evolving and RSS is making that happen. And yet, for all the amazing things RSS can do, it’s an extremely simple standard based on plain text. Lightweight, “easy” standards like these are the ones that win out on the Internet.
Text-oriented UIs
It’s not too weird to see plain text win out on the content side of things, but it’s also coming back in a big way in some user interfaces. Google should get a lot of credit for this: type in a few words and get what you want. Google has gotten us all used to this.
What I really like is seeing this metaphor extended into other areas…take 30 Boxes for example. Their killer feature, in my opinion, is the thing they call the One Box, which allows you to create appointments on your calendar just by typing Meeting with Bob thu 3pm into a Google-like centrally located text box at the top of the screen.
Another example that recently crossed my radar is an online productivity suite of sorts called Zoho. One of the modules is a word processing app called Zoho Writer, which has a similar prominent search box, but this one lets you search for a feature or help. For example, I selected a piece of text, searched for bold, and when I clicked on the first search result the highlighted text was made bold. It’s a nifty product overall and I’m considering using it to write blog posts.
Formatting
Speaking of that kind of thing, Textile is another example of a new text-based tool that makes something simple. (In this case, the thing that’s simplified is formatting text.) Text-based formatting languages have been around forever, but Textile and the other examples here are also powerfully simple.
Is rich media dead? Of course not. Podcasting is a good example of a recent development in this area, and companies like Podzinger are doing great work. But it’s tough to beat plain text ‘cause it’s so darn useful.
So, how do we work with all this text? Stay tuned for Part II of this discussion.
