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&gt; <i>What if we pretend we can go back in time, and create a transparent, gracefully degrading plain-text format that is trivial to build viewers and editors for?</i><p>Actually, the idea behind SGML&#x27;s SHORTREF feature is exactly that: yöu can define char sequences consisting of newlines, tabs, or any sequence of chars not already interpreted as markup delimiter, and gave SGML replace those into eg a start- or end-element tag or whatever, in a context-dependent way so you can cover most of markdown, or CSV, or JSON. And we have to go only as far back in time as 1986 when SGML was published as an ISO standard after a decade or so of reaching consensus. It&#x27;s not exactly trivial though, but not that hard either by today&#x27;s standard.<p>Beyond SGML, what&#x27;s really puzzling to me is that we keep on throwing mud against a wall to see what sticks, and every comp.sci. generation seem to reinvent everything from scratch without consideration what came before. It&#x27;s  especially paradoxical considering SGML legacy as a text format is directly in front of you as HTML, and materials on SGML and HTML are broadly accessible. Why invent text formats for the long haul if nobody bothers reading?