The future of education is plain text
What many developers either don&#x27;t understand or refuse to accept is that when it comes to distribution you don&#x27;t control formatting.  It doesn&#x27;t matter if that white space is explicit like white space characters or inferred from rules like CSS.<p>There is a naive assumption that all platforms and operating systems will treat your text (everything is either text or binary before it is parsed into something else) equally.  This is false.  When when this fallacy becomes self-evident many developers will refuse to modify their assumptions in the belief that consuming software will figure it out properly.  Sometimes that is true and sometimes will absolutely break your code&#x2F;prose&#x2F;data.  Clearly that assumption carries a heavy risk, but this is just data at rest.<p>When it comes to data moving over a wire the risk substantially increases, because all software that processes that text may make custom modifications along the way.  You don&#x27;t see it so much when the protocol is primitive like HTTP, pub&#x2F;sub, or RSS (but it still does happen frequently).  There are many distribution protocols are that less primitive and absolutely will mutilate the formatting of your documents, such as email (which is why there are email attachments).