In an essay on my main web page some time ago, I ranted about trying to find a text editor whose native format was something I’d still be able to read in twenty years. Turns out it’s been right under my nose: it’s the humble Mac OS X TextEdit application.

By default it reads and writes RTF, which is a good, decent format, but as you can see in the essay, I had settled in the end on HTML with UTF-8 text encoding as the most future-proof text format. I was using Netscape’s Composer to accomplish this, which, although serviceable, is a pretty heavyweight program to launch just to edit some text. I knew that TextEdit could both import and export HTML, but I hadn’t looked closely at the result. Having seen Microsoft Word’s HTML export, I figured it would be similar, the kind of thing that was technically legal but unreadable directly, having a huge ratio of metadata to data, more tags than text. Not so.

Tonight I accidentally began editing, in TextEdit, an HTML document that I had exported from RTF the night before. Not only was TextEdit’s behavior unchanged, but when I took a look at the resulting HTML source with Aquamacs Emacs, it was astonishingly clean and well-formed, looking like something I would have done by hand, with a neatly folded bit of embedded CSS up top to keep track of the fonts in one place, rather than spewing them throughout the document. And it was UTF-8 encoded. I’m not sure there’s any reason to keep saving stuff as RTF, after that. It is true that RTF has a proven track record, but this HTML is actually cleaner and more readable in source view.

The only remaining issue is that the Finder doesn’t want to double-click HTML documents open in TextEdit; it would rather launch Safari. Fortunately you can configure individual documents to open with TextEdit, which doesn’t seem too burdensome. I still wish TextEdit had automatic typographic quote support, but I’ve been living without that anyway. Three well-formed, concise cheers for TextEdit!