Plaintextonly

Plaintextonly is a term used to describe a design principle or policy that requires content to be delivered, stored, and processed as plain text, without any formatting, markup, or embedded media. It emphasizes simplicity and compatibility across different devices, platforms, and software. In practice, plaintextonly can apply to communication channels, documentation, interfaces, and data interchange where rich text or multimedia would otherwise be allowed.

Plaintext, in this context, refers to characters encoded in ASCII-compatible schemes, commonly UTF-8, with visible line breaks and no embedded control instructions for formatting or media. The primary aim of plaintextonly is to ensure readability and portability: content remains accessible to assistive technologies, archiving systems, and legacy tools that may not support complex formats. It also reduces security risks associated with scripts, embedded resources, or executable content.

Applications of plaintextonly include email sent with text/plain bodies, web content that offers a plain text alternative, command-line interfaces, log files, and documentation intended for broad distribution. In environments that enforce plaintextonly, rich text features, HTML, Markdown, or binary attachments are either disallowed or stripped.

Characteristics of plaintextonly content are its lack of styling, hyperlinks as clickable elements, and multimedia absence. Emphasis and structure are conveyed through plain punctuation, capitalization, and conventional paragraphing rather than formatting syntax. This can simplify version control and diff tracking but limits expressive capabilities and branding.

Implementation considerations include using the appropriate content type (for example, text/plain; charset=utf-8), defaulting to .txt or equivalent, and configuring systems to reject or sanitize markup. In some platforms, plaintextonly may be a configurable mode to enforce strict content handling for security, accessibility, and interoperability reasons.