I am surprised that the site uses funky HTML and not plain text to make sure that it is not readable

Ahh, the old battle of top-posting versus inline reply, and rich text vs plaintext.

I hate to break it to you, author, but that battle was lost a long long time ago.

Personally, I'd much rather something like Markdown... for those with a GUI client, you could get rich rendering and editing, but with reasonable degradation for less capable clients.

Yeah plain text is great and everything...until you want to put a table in there.

Try sending a link... :)