#molecularnote Could be great fodder for the first molecular note Data are ordered sequences of zeros and ones. [[Binary]] - [[It's All Ones and Zeroes]] [[Plain Text Files are Really Just the Text]] That makes plain text [[More is Unnecessary, Less is Impossible.|Perfect Tool]] for many things. This isn't true for plain text with repetitive and redundant data, where [[Huffman Tree|Compression]] can save you storage (at the cost of needing compress & expand every time its used). [[Plain Text Superpowers]] include its [[Plain Text Durability]], size and speed, its easy (and awesome) to leverage tools like [[Obsidian]] and live [[The Plain Text Life]]. Plain text isn't just `.txt`, though. [[Markdown]] is plain text, and it gives you access to basic formatting like **bold**, *italic*, headings, and hyperlinks, ([[Extended Markdown Syntax|at a minimum]]). There are [[Markdown Alternatives]] that also let you insert formatting via lightweight markup. Plain text can be written and read by humans for humans, by humans for computer, by computers for humans, or by computers for computers. Plain text isn't just for writing, though. It makes for an excellent [[Data Basics|data]] storage medium. A number of file formats we use all the time (even if we don't know it) are just plain text. [[CSV]], [[TSV]], [[JSON]], [[YAML]], [[TOML]], [[HTML]], and [[Turtle]] are all just plaintext under the hood. This article looks at those. The simplicity king: `.txt` The data simplicity king: `.csv` The complex data simplicity king: `.json`