Hey party people!

I'm working on a project that parses all the markdown files in the doc directory of this repo, and I've come across a number of instances of inconsistent naming of the plaintext info string (i.e. the language) in GitHub Flavored Markdown code fencing:

I'm currently using this hack to sanitize all the incoming markdown before converting it to HTML:

markdown = markdown
  .replace(/```txt/gm, '```plaintext')
  .replace(/```text/gm, '```plaintext')
  .replace(/```fundamental/gm, '```plaintext')
  .replace(/```raw/gm, '```plaintext')
  .replace(/```markdown<.*$/gm, '```plaintext')
  .replace(/```plaintext<.*$/gm, '```plaintext')

Here's what the current documentation style guide says about code blocks:

• For code blocks:
  • Use language aware fences. ("```js")
  • Code need not be complete. Treat code blocks as an illustration or aid to
    your point, not as complete running programs. If a complete running program
    is necessary, include it as an asset in assets/code-examples and link to
    it.

There's no mention of what the canonical language should be for plaintext, but I'd suggest standardizing on one of the following:

• text is the most commonly used plaintext info string in this project
• plaintext is what the popular highlight.js syntax highlighting library expects

I don't have a strong opinion about what the info string should be as long as it's used consistently across the docs. I'd be happy to open a pull request to clean these up, but wanted to open an issue first for discussion.

Things that might need to be done to resolve this:

• Choose an info string for plain text
• Update docs to all use the same info string
• Update the style guide
• Add a linting rule?
• What else?

cc @nodejs/documentation 👋