@enkiv2

@daughterofrao

The great misconception I'd like to counter is the idea of "text file". In my experience, most of non-technical people can't grasp the idea of plain text files, as the only form of text they know is MS Word documents. Some people have never seen a text file, others might've thought of it as some kind of "broken" or "misbihaving" as it didn't open in their "text editor". Sometimes I was requested to send some pieces of information, and was accused in sending a "broken file" because it was a plain txt.

What MS Office have done to people is a crime, that keeps reinforcing itself. Non-technical people in power "guard this knowledge" by forcing their non-technical subordinates to only use MS Word and nothing else.

I wouldn't have guessed on my own that this would become a problem if I didn't witness it with my own eyes.

And tutorials would go like "HTML file is just a plain text file, that you can edit in your favorite text editor", but suddenly this statement is either unhelpful (at best) or misleading (at worst).

How to explain what "plain text" is to someone who have never seen one?

@enkiv2 @daughterofrao I feel this so much. I will make sure my daughter learns basic html when she's old enough to tinker with it. I think it's something that needs to be addressed in school as a basic skill. I'm old enough that the web wasn't really a global public thing that you could access until I'd finished uni the first time around, though it did start ramping up not long after. Geocities might have been my first attempt at a website, but I started registering domains not long after. At a basic level, if you don't have any php or databases, you can keep a simple website up without any maintenance for decades (and that's precisely what I've done in some cases - but in others I've let people complicate them and then be left a difficult task to learn all the complexity myself when they stop maintaining them, so I can appreciate many non-nerds being horribly intimidated.)