[npunt]

Yeah, whether or not it's intentional, the approach taken is one that will generate a lot of feedback.

I haven't seen anyone mention it in this thread, but my immediate reaction to seeing JSON Canvas was that it looks like a spiritual sibling to Markdown, a famously (and intentionally) informal spec.

There's a real wisdom to this informal spec approach, and it's worked incredibly well for Markdown despite grumblings about its lack of standardization.

I imagine this is the Obsidian team's intention with JSON Canvas. Obsidian has really benefitted from the informality of Markdown, which meant they were free to extend it in ways that made sense to the product (with things like cross-page ^ references, yaml frontmatter, etc), without triggering the Spec Police. The same perhaps applies here to Canvas products.