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I think the real limit of plain text is pretty obvious: you cannot embed pictures in it.

It’s like SMS vs MMS or modern chat. With pure text, you can at best add a link to a picture (which could get rotten or inaccessible for other reasons), but you cannot directly graphical content.

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Sure you can:

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhMAAwAPAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAMAAw AAAC8IyPqcvt3wCcDkiLc7C0qwyGHhSWpjQu5yqmCYsapyuvUUlvONmOZtfzgFz ByTB10QgxOR0TqBQejhRNzOfkVJ+5YiUqrXF5Y5lKh/DeuNcP5yLWGsEbtLiOSp a/TPg7JpJHxyendzWTBfX0cxOnKPjgBzi4diinWGdkF8kjdfnycQZXZeYGejmJl ZeGl9i2icVqaNVailT6F5iJ90m6mvuTS4OK05M0vDk0Q4XUtwvKOzrcd3iq9uis F81M1OIcR7lEewwcLp7tuNNkM3uNna3F2JQFo97Vriy/Xl4/f1cf5VWzXyym7PH hhx4dbgYKAAA7

from:https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2397#section-4

You cannot send your photo in color though.

Of course you can. You can convert any image to base64.

You can but it’s not part of a plaintext standard. You could certainly build a text editor which can decode a base64 string, but to transform that into a picture you need something implementing the GIF (or JPEG or PNG) specification, otherwise it’s just a binary blob.

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