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The past, present and future of (portable) text is text. No need for wrapping your text in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) :-) really. Keep it simple. See https://github.com/mundimark/why-text or https://github.com/officetxt/awesome-txt and others :-).

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This category of standards for structured text will look simple and sufficient. But they break once you bring in more complicated formatting options like font-size, background colour, etc. Which is why we need rich-text standards that aren't opinionated on what formatting to allow.

I'm not entirely sure what you're arguing here re unopionated, but SGML (on what HTML is based) has had automatic recognition of Wiki text delimiters and producing XML-style canonical markup from eg. markdown and other Wiki syntax since before 1986. Kind of the best of both worlds for both easy editing and rich and sophisticated structuring. It's also odd that we're still discussing these things after all these years; so long so, in fact, that we've forgotten how those before us tackled these issues.

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