J

Plain Text

As data model

The important thing is the “flatness” of the format. A text document is self-contained, it does not depend on a specific UI/relation to maintain it’s information.

This gaurds you against prematurely forcing your data into a relational schema. Important to be careful re. unnecessary databases

HTML is plain text.

Markdown is plain text that is easier to write than HTML.

References

Always Bet on Text