setextSetext stands for structure enhanced text markup method. It was developed by Ian Feldman to provide a method of increasing the expressive power of plain ASCII text, and aimed especially at those who communicate using ASCII (as many do) in e-mail and Usenet news communication.
Setext assumes that users will have a hardware configuration which allows the display of text in ASCII, using a fixed width font, and a minimum line length of 68 characters. This markup is easily learned and can be a useful tool for outlining, text markup and generating hypertext. ASCII is often referred to as "plain vanilla ASCII," and Ian Feldman describes its three basic text modes as "flavors": flowing, quote, and preformatted. There are various methods of creating and viewing setext.
Commonly one converts the setext to HTML, and views the text using a WWW browser such as Mosaic. There are also setext browsers; setext does not have to be viewed using a browser, but setext browsers add features to the text and are available from various ftp sites.