Plain Text
Plain text is a digital representation of unformatted textual data, consisting only of readable characters without any embedded styling, fonts, or structural markup. It is typically encoded using standards like ASCII or UTF-8, making it universally readable across different systems and software. This simplicity ensures compatibility and ease of processing in programming, data storage, and communication protocols.
Developers should use plain text for configuration files, source code, logs, and data exchange where human readability and cross-platform compatibility are critical, such as in .txt, .csv, or .json files. It is essential for scripting, version control systems like Git, and command-line operations, as it avoids the complexity and potential errors introduced by binary or formatted data formats.