You're against bold, italics, underline? Headings? Any image support at all?
(If your client interprets them, then you're not actually asking for plain text anymore.)
Making it unobtrusive enough to still look good when uninterpreted is a good goal. But that's very different from having nothing at all.
And there was a long history (about 100 years) of monospaced, mono-sized, typographic conventions based on typewriters and cheap reproduction (carbon paper, spirit duplicators, xerography), before the desktop-publishing era brought us out of that in the 1980s. The problem with formatting is that, like Johnny Rocco in Key Largo, someone always wants more, and not for your benefit but theirs.[1]
#ThisIsWhyWeCannotHaveNiceThings
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114500
In the Web world, counter to an argument elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27113404), my experience is that Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. Straight ASCII text (via w3m or other text-mode browsers), or Reader Mode (where supported) is vastly preferable to many, many nines worth of sites' prescribed designs.
One thought I've had is that user agents could provide, at user discretion, additional typographic control to sites. But for the basics you're limited to 7-bit (not 8) ASCII. Everything else is earned, and you'd best degrade very gracefully.
I've seen websites written where every individual paragraph has an explicitly-specified location. I've seen blogs written entirely in header-level tags. I've seen writers who add nonbreaking whitespace to the start of every paragraph. I've seen blink, marquee, and carousel abuse. I've seen foreground and background colours you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion....
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Notes:
Inputting by hand (or maybe with a script - who cares anyway?) random Unicode characters to show that rich text is actually possible is the opposite of "smart" in a discussion between reasonable adults.
Yep, that was me that time as well.
> Inputting by hand (or maybe with a script
I did it by hand. There are websites to do this, but I’m not interested in doing this for any regular purpose, so I don’t think I have them saved. Besides, it’s more interesting to do it manually; you learn things about how Unicode works if you involve yourself in the low-level details once in a while.
> the opposite of "smart" in a discussion between reasonable adults.
Or maybe it’s humorous? You know, fun?
Fun?!? On my HackerNews?!?
Burn the heretic!
Most people are unaware that Unicode has that kind of character and even fewer people know what it does to screen readers.
The difference between showing off knowledge and trying to be show people a cool thing you know about is intent and it's REALLY hard to get that across on the internet.
Agreed, that's why I like emojis, for example. They're whimsical, and they increase a bit the bandwidth of written communication.
Alas, HN doesn't support them because of reasons ¯\_(ツ)_/¯