[revelation]

Well, yes, only then everyone realized it takes you another good 2-3x of the work over and above writing text to put it into a form which is "machine-understandable" with a whole bunch of metadata and requires the people writing the text to be familiar with all of that and have a good idea what is "machine-understandable" and what is not, for..

zero gain. There is just no application. Google works perfectly fine. Give it up already.

And just to take this to another tangent.. Word won the office space. There are no normal people writing LaTeX for their party invitation. And hell, even the people writing LaTeX don't want to bother with the "machine-understandable" thing so they went ahead and made it into a proper Turing complete programming language.

[Natanael_L]

I think the solution is smarter document editors. Auto correct / suggest with context awareness, database integrations, machine learning / basic AI, and so on.

Even simple stuff like asking the writer to clarify which piece of a text that a written date applies to would be helpful, and to define what parts of long sentences with many commas belong together (which subsentences are interjections, for example?).