From the 70's to 2007 the open source .txt filename extension format commonly referred to plain text documents encoded using the ASCII character set. To support internationalization and localization, .txt text documents are today text files encoded using the UTF-8 or UTF-16LE standard which is a superset of the ASCII character set. Text documents of type .txt typically have minimal formatting for example no support for bold or italic characters or support for bullet points etc. This allows .txt documents to use minimum storage space and be platform independent as long as the operating system supports the underlying encoding character set used to create the .txt document. On windows .txt file support has existed since 1985 when Windows 1.0 was released and since then has been mostly associated with the notepad application on Microsoft Windows.
The hypertext markup language, commonly referred to as HTML is at the backbone of the internet and World Wide Web. It is the standard markup language used in the creation of webpages and was released in 1993 at the advent of the internet. The format defines the structure and layout of a webpage through markup tags such as header tags and image tags from which a browser can interpret multimedia information for on screen presentation. To view files and webpages saved with the .html filename extension, one needs a compatible web browser that implements the HTML specification. Because the format is open source, several browsers which are mostly free to use can open such files. The World Wide Web consortium actively maintains and updates the html specification.