one of my favorite weblogs featuring tips, tricks and hacks, has a pretty useful post about the power of simple text files:

Like a lot of geeks and aspirational geeks, I do as many things as possible in plain text files. I’ve endlessly sung the praises of text on 43F, but in a nutshell, they’re portable, efficient, tiny, and almost endlessly mungible. They’re the lingua franca of Unix and most of the civilized world.