Comment by agargarg

But it wouldn't handle indentation properly, unless you define a standard formatting convention similar to Markdown. For example, you need to handle bullet points. But what if a plain, non-indented text just happens to contain a star at the start of a line? This means headaches for text writers to avoid these edge cases, and wrong indentation when viewing legacy texts.

Also, all viewers would have to support it, which somewhat defeats the purpose of using plain text.