[sindoc]

I agree with the author. There’s merit in an open format to be developed with a simple spec as pretty much defined here. Of course more formalism should he attached to it i.e. BNF (am I too old?)

Anyway, one of the giants making billions out of data should maybe commission the publication of such a standard and the implementations in every programming language will follow, I’m sure.

The Unicode bit alone and an enforced mine type makes the case in my opinion and it should have streaming capabilities as well. Maybe chunking of content so that it can be used for caching and compression, ideally still human readable but not marked up like XML so you can’t see the end of it.