[qwerty456127]

> markdown data is extracted from files. md -> HTML -> ASCII was the hairy

Out of pure perfectionism (in avoiding unnecessary complexity and dependencies) I hope we can omit the HTML part one day. It probably isn't going to be hard to just parse MarkDown directly. Sure, MarkDown is supposed to allow inclusion of HTML tags but I don't use any except in some rare cases like when I need a page break for pretty export.

> I was aiming to bring timestamps in but realised that the timestamps aren't available consistently in Linux

This can be among motivations for putting them in the front matter. Another being the fact the file system timestamps can change when you perform operations which don't actually change their content. At this moment I'm looking forward for a script (I was going to write it myself as time would permit) which would scan all the files and add/update front matter to include (if it doesn't) creation time (in ISO UTC format like YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.ffffffZ) initialized as the fs's file creation or modification time, whichever is earlier.

> FrontMatter is a good shout, I haven't used any in my notes, hopefully that content can be parsed neatly.

I even hope Obsidian authors are going to add support for tags (as just the names of tags and links, I don't think existence of tags and links with same names is a useful case to support) listed in the front matter as `Tags: tag_a, tag_b, Link C` once. I am going to use this even if they don't although it's sad to see Obsidian doesn't recognize them there.