On a practical note, one of the disadvantages of plain text is that foreign language characters aren't supported - for example, if I was to set a story in Britain I might want to use the UK pound (money) sign, and it isn't part of the ASCII character set but is supported by HTML. Foreign names and words also often omit umlauts and other special accents that are possible in HTML
It's not supported by html per se, you can screw the characters even more.
It would be done via setting a character set and it is not quarantied that the other person has the same charset available or the browser is configured to change charset or the other requirements that might come with specific charsets (you'd need a font that is combatible, you might need a specific language support installed on your computer).
Not to mention that all files would need to be converted to be combatible. Your pound for example would need to be converted to £ or £ and the last only if one of the Unicode charsets is used. If Unicode is used, you can't be sure the other side is set to understand it. You can't just write the pound sign into the text and expect the reader's software to show it and not some gibberish.
Also the people doing the conversion would need software that is ready to accept the unconverted files (starting with their email programmes, unless the stories are attached as files) and then convert them (some programmes can convert to html, but aren't capable to convert the characters).
I see it every day in a forum I frequent, they don't ask for a specific charset, all the Umlaute come out as question marks, because many other users post using the standard Windows charset, but my system is set to default to Unicode when no charset is specified. Unfortunately that windows character set doesn't map to Unicode or vice versa.
I also see it in some of the html stories at Anne's place, because those aren't always properly set up either, the "" or rather all the fancy characters used instead often come out all wrong.
As another example this forum askes for a specific charset (ISO-8859-1 also known as Latin-I) which supports many European languages, but you may still differing display of some characters and some European alphabets like Greek or Cyrillic aren't supported by it either.
I voted for text, becuase I remember a time when I had very limited internet time, grabbing all interesting things onto a disk floppy disk and reading them at home on a computer that did not understand html and would only do plain text.
And I actually like reading the files as they are formatted now, the text isn't as wide as it would be in a html file, which makes it easier for me to read it. Text has it's disadvantages, but it is the smallest denominator most system will agree upon.
