# [WIP]What is "text"?

Flat ASCII files for many, line-mode clients for some, spending time in a
console session for others.

It became fashionable to rawdog the "computing experience" on a console. But is
it still about text when you run a media player in the framebuffer?
Text and some kind of imposed frugality get conflated here.

The "bias" of the smolnet community towards text-only protocols is a "big W" -
- it brings discoverability and repairability back, makes everything hackable
in a much natural and faster way.

But then -- is some Markdown-style formatting a real problem? I thought one of
Gemini's advantages was "text is always text, it won't automagically run on my
computer and do things I might or might not be okay with.".  Meanwhile some
self-proclaimed purists scream at any attempt to make theV individual
expression of content creators (BTW: it doesn't sound dirty at all in smolnet
context) a bit more "rich". The good thing about text is -- it's easily
modifiable, no need to crack some proprietary, binary format or trudge through
minified HTMLs. After it got fetched onto the local disk or into the local
memory -- one can do with it whatever they want. Drop the chaff, make the rest
look exactly the way we want - no need to be dogmatic about what a person on
the other side of connection considers right.