Markdown and plain text

[packbat]

Yesterday, we posted a fediverse checkbox poll on indiepocalypse.social asking, "Are .md Markdown files plaintext?". The poll received 49 votes, with eight respondents additionally replying to discuss details of the question, and the final percentages including 71% yes, 31% no, and 16% I don't know, with substantial overlap between all three of these.

(Also, 12% spiderman. Because Mastodon injokes.)

I think what makes it an interesting question is the term "plain text" (which apparently has a space, apologies). What is, and what is not, plain text? Let's run through some possibilities.

Are .md Markdown files .txt text files?

No. The extensions are different, so your computer treats them differently.

Are .md Markdown files encoded as binary?

Okay, technically, all binary computer files are binary, but no - the whole format is designed around extended-ASCII text encoding like UTF-8. You can edit it in Notepad or KWrite or TextEdit or gedit or vi or, I don't know, whatever you want.

Are .md Markdown files completely unformatted?

I mean, no, clearly. When you have, for example, *asterisks* being used to indicate words that are emphasized, that is a kind of formatting.

Are .md Markdown files readable in plain text editors?

Kinda? The link formatting - [link text in square brackets](immediately followed by url in parentheses) - is not very friendly to the eye, tables often get very nasty to read, probably other issues we weren't reminded of - but it's mostly readable. Not as readable as a 1998 GameFAQs guide, but mostly readable.

Are .md Markdown files designed for styled presentation?

Yes. This was news to us Packbats, but when we installed Linux, we got Okular with it, and when we opened a .md file with Ocular, we didn't see asterisks for emphasis and square brackets and parentheses for links and so on - we saw italics text, underlined link passages, headers, bulleted lists, and so on. It looked like how it looks when we write something in HTML and open it in a browser. Windows 7 didn't have anything for viewing Markdown that way.

Are .md Markdown files .txt text files?

No. In a .txt file, formatting is idiosyncratic, driven by aesthetic and pragmatic judgments about what the audience will want to and be able to parse. In a Markdown file, formatting has to comform to a sta—... okay, stop laughing. In a Markdown file, there is theoretically a standard, and the file is promising with its extension that a computer which will never even try to understand the writer or the writer's motives can produce a styled output by implementing the standard, even if it probably has to recognize some extensions to actually guess right on what it looks like.

So, yeah. I think the moral of the story is that it's not obvious what "plain text" means, but hey ... it was fun asking.